In many organisations, managing contracts is looked at as an additional activity that employees need to do. Contracts, instead, should exist to serve organisations by helping them plan for business proceedings and transactions in the drafting stage and fulfill their duties or obligations towards subjects in the contract in the post-award stage. However, for enterprises, it’s impractical to screen thousands of contracts when there’s real need to act on the critical information that contracts possess.
Contract lifecycle management (CLM) systems are designed to help companies store and act on critical information that contracts have. They store metadata and actionable information in a way that prioritizes proactiveness, visibility and organisation. Not only do they allow for a single place to securely store contracts, they assist greatly by facilitating collaboration between different functional teams to ensure integrity and thoroughness of your contracts. Read on to learn about the several ways organizations benefit from an Enterprise CLM.
Organizational agility
Taking advantage of the cloud, Enterprise CLMs make it possible for contract managers to take their work with them, wherever they go. Apart from being highly scalable, the contract repository has uptimes of 99.9% if services like Azure are used, making them highly reliable for enterprises. CLMs that come with Contract Discovery enable organisations to extract key data from contracts without manual reading. When integrated with CRM and ERP, users are able to obtain customer and counterparty data without changing applications, thus creating a seamless experience.
Security to your contracts
Enterprise CLMs have built in measures for disaster recovery that ensure security to the organization’s contractual assets. Integration with your organisation’s Active Directory service provides Single Sign-on experience to the CLM, thereby eliminating the need to maintain multiple profiles for access to the system. Actions taken by users in the system generate trails allowing for a thorough review of the process while boosting transparency in your organisation.
Process efficiency
Self Service features in Enterprise CLMs save time by reducing business users’ dependencies on the legal and contract specialist teams. Once drafted, contracts are sent to the reviewers through automated workflows. Every single person involved in the process is notified of the progress of the workflow through email notifications. In addition, cloud platforms for Enterprise CLMs provide added security to the contracts while requiring zero maintenance from the organization’s part.
Reduced Risk
Enterprises that adopt a CLM benefit from a streamlined process for creation and development of contracts. The software can be configured according to the guidelines set out by your organization for adding compliance to your contracts. The reporting capabilities of CLM allows organizations in monitoring contract performance and obligation tracking. Other than reminders that users set up for critical contract tasks, important events like contract milestones and renewal dates are seen on the CLM calendar itself.
Brings order
CLM solutions help organizations in standardizing their contract management process. Owing to functionality for communication and collaboration within the system, CLM facilitates smooth flow of work between departments and roles. Search being an important function for CLMs, users can easily avail counterparty and vendor information without needing to look into different softwares. Business users can create and track requests made to legal teams within the CLM itself thereby avoiding dependencies on complicated email threads.
Cost optimization
Enterprise CLMs can work with your organization’s existing infrastructure to connect with your document libraries and associated metadata thereby creating a seamless exchange of information with other applications on the platform. Automation of the contract process reduces cycle times and benefits organizations in faster realization of revenue by helping close deals on time. Organizations can see faster return on investments after implementing CLM solutions.
CLM solutions help organizations in significantly reducing contract related risks. With means for proactive completion of business undertakings, organizations stand a higher chance at fulfilling their business goals while improving relations with partners and third parties.
Optimus BT is a leader in the Enterprise Contract Management space, having spent the last decade leading departmental and enterprise digitization efforts for companies using SharePoint and Office 365. Our CLM solution, eContracts was built with the needs of enterprises in mind. To know more about eContracts, send an email to info@optimusbt.net
