Contract Relationship Management: How to Improve it with Data
By Justin Perkins, Solution Engineer at Contract Logix
Having a central contract management repository is key for effective contract management. One of the big benefits a proper solution should provide is convenient and complete access to all your contract data. And while there are several benefits to leveraging contract data, one way it can be especially helpful is in contract relationship management. It doesn’t matter if these relationships are with vendors, suppliers, customers, hospitals, Martians, or even internal business subsidiaries.
With Contract Logix and our software’s intelligent approach to contract data management, you get a holistic view of what’s happening at the organization or company level, not just at the individual contract level. It’s all made possible by the innovative way our platform structures your contract data. This provides a lot of role-based flexibility and value for anyone in your business interested in understanding what’s going on with specific partners or vendors and the status of their overall relationship with your organization. And rather than having to build a report to get some decent analytics on all this organizational information, structured data allows you to quickly get complete visibility of these details all in one central location.
These Organization records will become the first place you go to view high-level information of everything happening with your contract relationship management for a specific account. They contain all the key details from standard address information to more detailed risk, security, and compliance information. All the data captured is tailored to your needs and can change based on the type of company you are doing business with because you might have different items you care about when dealing with a vendor versus a customer.
Capturing and getting visibility into all this organizational data lets you start to view a more historical approach to your business relationships. You have access to view all key contracts associated with specific organizations. This, of course, assumes accessing this data has the appropriate permissions based on role-based security which protects those more sensitive contracts and details. Further, you can quickly filter, sort, and drill down into these contract records if you need additional details.
You can also attach supporting documents such as tax information or W9’s which are important as part of your relationship, but not necessarily a contract record themselves. This allows you to easily find and reference these files at a company level and search for text within those documents by leveraging our Full-Text Search capabilities. Centralizing the management of these records into one central source of truth assures you always have the latest and greatest version of each item.
Finally, you can create tasks and key date alert notifications (email and in-system alerts) at an organization level. What if you would like to do a yearly review of your entire relationship with a business partner? This isn’t specific to just a single contract but everything you are doing with them today and have done with them in the past. Viewing this information at an organizational level allows you to control a more specific review process.
Takeaway
Structuring, capturing, and visualizing your organization data for contracts provides significant benefits and is simple and easy to begin leveraging. No magic or manual effort is needed since the data is intelligently structured and automatically roles up as you create and link new items together through our standard processes. You are always able to get the mile-high view from a company level and have the full ability to drill down to a specific individual contract, document, or event task attached to these records. You can control your processes, tasks, and alerts for each business your company is managing a contractual relationship.
Effective contract relationship management is critical to your success. With our contract software, you can quickly learn everything you need about each organization. That’s just one way our structured data approach helps support your goals for more effective contract lifecycle management.
Interested in learning more? Let’s start a conversation today.