Contracts are essential to your business, and so is an effective contract management system. If you’ve taken on an initiative to streamline and optimize your quote-to-cash process, but you ignore contracts, you are seriously stifling any impending success. You may not reach perfection overnight, but by following the steps of the contract maturity model, you can turn contract management into a strategic process that is intuitive and transparent for your business in a tempered, processed way.
- Consolidation – It is implemented by templates, clause libraries, search functionality, import utilities, single contract type support. Eliminate information silos and connect your front- and back-end systems to create one central repository for all aspects of your contracts, including templates, clauses and exceptions. With a single source of truth, you and approved business users, partners and customers can view, manage, update and search your contracts for necessary and accurate information.
- Task automation – It is implemented by office automation, authoring tools, drag and drop clauses, redlining, versioning, approval workflow, back-office integration. Automate manual processes to free up valuable legal time and energy so your lawyers can focus on critical or special-case contracts relevant to their expertise. Task automation increases process control, reduces the number of errors and speeds up the contract cycle time.
- Process efficiencies – It is achieved by multiple contract-type support, contract assembly, single sign-on security, multi-national support, alerts and notifications, collaboration, mobile access, e-signature. Process efficiencies create a well-organized contract process so all stakeholders – Legal, Finance, Sales and departments managing obligations and deliverables – can spend time on critical tasks that correlate with their expertise and job role. Your enterprise will experience faster contract cycle times, reduce admin costs and off-site capabilities with e-signature.
- Contract performance – It is assessed by analytics, reporting, role-based dashboards, terms compliance tracking, milestone analysis, spend analysis, profitability, renewal management, invoicing. As a company, you’re always encouraged, or even expected, to improve, and contract management should be held to that same standard. Gain visibility into your contracts and contract process to identify and remedy pain points or gaps in order to provide the best service to your customers.
