Contract Management API: Integrating CLM with Your Business Apps
By Dave Parks & Wayne Foster
As companies increasingly adopt and leverage contract management software to help digitize and modernize their contract management processes, it’s no surprise that many of them are interested in connecting their contract software to other business applications. It’s a question we hear all the time when talking to prospects and customers about their contract management strategy and use cases, “can we integrate your software with our other systems?”
Luckily, the short and simple answer to that question is, “yes, you can do that via our contract management API.” And that’s a good thing because there are a number of reasons and benefits to doing it. However, before jumping into any application integration, it’s always a good idea to ask yourself a few additional questions to make sure you have a clear picture of what you’re trying to accomplish.
- What do you need the integration to do? For example, do you want to send, or receive, or sync data from your CRM, ERP, ITSM, MAP or BI system to your CLM system?
- What departments or personnel are looking for what data and from which application? How will the data be used for business intelligence reporting?
- Which application will be the database of record or single source of truth and for which data types? Will some of these applications be used as middleware?
By answering questions like these you’ll have a good baseline understanding of what the integration needs to do. From there, you can decide if a common “out-of-the-box” contract management API integration with another application is sufficient or if you’ll need to rope in a developer or two to build something more custom.
From there, it’s easy to start identifying all the benefits that such an integration will deliver. Below are just a few examples why some of our customers integrate Contract Logix’s contract management API with other business applications:
- Receive vendor management updates from your ERP system to identify contract opportunities to optimize those relationships.
- Send customer information from your CRM to auto-populate contract fields like Organization or Contact Information. Or, give sales people real-time visibility into contract dates, stages, and statues that are being worked on in legal or elsewhere.
- Sync and track financial obligations such as contract line items about items purchased or sold in contracts to your accounting software.
- Aggregate all your reporting and contract data with your business intelligence applications to provide a complete and holistic view of what’s going on in the business.
- Bulk upload all of your contracts from an old shared folder application like SharePoint or Box into our dynamic and digital contract repository.
Whatever your use case, there are number of reasons why businesses may need to integrate applications with each other, and contract management software is no exception. And at the end of the day, ensuring the integrity of data across your business is critical. That’s why Contract Logix’s contract management API easily integrates with your existing business applications such as ERP, CRM and ITSM –just to name a few. You’ll ensure a single source of truth for all your data and deliver increased productivity, accuracy and business intelligence. We support all the common business use cases and our contract management API is also fully customizable for your specific business needs.
And for the IT folks out there who want to know some of the technical details:
- Yes, we support a flexible REST API that lets you bi-directionally send, receive, and sync your data between applications.
- Yes, you need to authenticate.
- Yes, you can GET, PUT, POST and DELETE your contract records, organization records, contact records and even custom object records.
The Contract Logix contract management API is a secure and efficient solution. If you’re interested in learning more about the benefits of contract management software and how you can integrate it with your other business applications, we encourage you to schedule a conversation with one of our CLM Specialists.