4 Reasons You Need Enterprise Contract Lifecycle Management Software
By David Parks
Digital transformation (DX) is and continues to be a huge focus for organizations around the globe. As companies digitally transform the way they do business, they also need to digitally transform the way they manage contracts. As a result, the adoption of enterprise contract management software is on the rise because it plays an instrumental role in any digital transformation strategy.
Enterprise contract lifecycle management software gives busy teams in legal, procurement, and contract administration a digital and integrated set of tools to handle all the tasks associated with contract creation, negotiation, execution, and on-going management like post-execution rights, obligations, and reviews – all from a single platform.
And while many different features of an enterprise contract lifecycle management software solution come together to make contract management modern and digitized, they ultimately provide four main benefits:
- Centralization
- Accessibility
- Automation
- Visibility
The Time is Now for Enterprise Contract Lifecycle Management Software
It goes without saying that ineffective and traditional methods for contract management are a major risk for any organization. Without a modern and digital enterprise contract lifecycle management software solution in place, it can be impossible for your contract management to keep pace with your digital transformation efforts. After all, digital transformation is all about using data to deliver business insights and if you’re managing contracts with spreadsheets, shared folders, and email then it is impossible to access and leverage the wealth of data in your legal agreements.
Additionally, trying to manage your contracts manually means you have no simple way of answering many common, yet critical, questions such as:
- Where is the contract I need and is this the most recent version?
- Which contracts are about to expire?
- What is the status of this contract? Draft? In negotiation? Approved? Expired?
- Is the contract I’m drafting using approved language and terms?
- What contracts have clauses and terms that pose a higher level of risk?
Being unable to answer questions like these opens the door to some serious business risks:
- Lack of compliance, which can lead to fines, loss of accreditation, and lawsuits
- Delays associated with tracking down documents, verifying versions, and haphazard searches for data within documents
- Missing expiration dates that result in unwanted autorenewals
- Sending out the wrong documents for review or approval
- Signing the wrong documents or failing to secure all counter signatures
- Losing contracts or associated documents due to broken links, file renaming, or indiscriminate filing
A proper enterprise contract lifecycle management software solution will help you mitigate these risks and effectively support your organization’s digital transformation requirements. Let’s look at 4 main ways it makes that possible.
1. Centralization
Have you ever searched for a finalized copy of a contract only to find out that it’s stored solely on a
single person’s hard drive – and that person is on vacation? Enterprise contract lifecycle management software enables you to establish a centralized, digital, and dynamic contract repository, making them easy to manage, search, and secure. All of your contract data is in one place giving you the ability to begin harnessing it for actionable insights.
Centralization is the backbone of your contract management process, supporting and enabling all the other areas of contract management. Without a centralized location for documents and data, important functions such as reporting and analysis become nearly impossible.
2. Accessibility
Hand in hand with Centralization comes Accessibility. Once you’ve uploaded all your contracts and supporting documents in your central repository, you can make access to them and the data inside simple and easy. Enterprise contract lifecycle management software provides your team access to contracts and supporting documents at anytime from anywhere.
However, there may be cases where you want certain team members to be able to modify only certain portions of the contract, or to not be able to modify or access certain contracts or information. With robust feature-based and role-based permissions, enterprise contract management software gives you tight control over contract accessibility and security.
3. Automation
The ability to automate business processes and routine tasks is a huge advantage of an enterprise contract management software solution for both pre- and post-execution phases of a contract’s lifecycle. It’s a major way that it helps mitigate risks and increase efficiency and compliance.
For pre-execution of a contract, capabilities such as automated workflows ensure contracts are routed to the appropriate people at the appropriate time and situation. They also provide a holistic view of where contracts are in your process. You can also automatically convert contract requests into actual contracts and assemble those agreements via clause and template libraries based on your business rules. For post-execution of a contract, automated features like alerts and notifications ensure you never miss an important deadline, obligation, or date. These are just a few examples of the automation that enterprise contract lifecycle management software provides.
4. Visibility
Knowledge is power and enterprise contract lifecycle management software gives you accurate insight into the full scope of your contracts. A good enterprise contract management software solution will offer a number of valuable features that provide actionable business information.
Some examples of this include real-time reports and dashboards so that you can benchmark and track contract related KPIs important to optimizing your processes. You will also have the flexibility to view contracts and related documents by virtually any relationship such as contract type, vendor, contact and more. Features such as stage and status tracking will help you know exactly what’s happening with a particular contract and powerful text and advanced search capabilities provide access to all the data in your agreements. And document revision and version control tracking ensures you are always working on the right agreement.
Takeaway
If your organization is looking to improve its contract management or simply wants a solution that’s modern, digital, and automated, then enterprise contract management software is for you. This is especially true for companies that see the value in digital transformation and understand the critical role that effective contract management plays in the success of their overall business. With enterprise contract lifecycle management software, you will get the centralization, accessibility, automation, and visibility necessary to achieve true contracting excellence. Schedule a demo of Contract Logix’s solution to find out how.