cloud-based contract management system

Nearly 80percent of business activities are controlled by contracts. Contracts make up a significant part of every business. If you're a young company or a huge corporation there is a good chance that you will be working with hundreds of contracts . They include partnerships agreements, non-disclosure agreements or general employment agreements property and equipment contracts the list goes on. How efficiently are you handling these contracts? Do you depend on paper or spreadsheets, as well as other outdated systems? Have you thought about moving to contracts management software? If so, this article is for you.

contract management

Before you invest in a contract management solution, ensure that you review these seven points to avoid the pitfalls.

software solutions contract management tools

Does the program include AI capabilities?

contract life cycle management

With the sheer amount of contractsto manage, maintaining uniformity, managing contracts and getting essential information to be accessed is huge challenges. The companies may not have standard method of organizing their contract databases. For example, you have an abundance of procurement contracts with various renewal dates and renegotiation terms. Representatives from your team will likely to be tasked with tracing, reviewing and tracking the information to ensure that the right opportunities are not missed. Instead, if you go using an artificial intelligence-powered system to manage contracts, your task can be completed within minutes. Thanks to Doc.AI capabilities, documents such as contracts' titles, renewal dates agreements, and other terms of negotiation can be extracted. This facilitates reviews, approvals and signs offs.

software contract management

Then there's more to it. Further, advanced management of contracts systems equipped with AI capabilities help to analyze contracts, compare clauses, and organize contracts according the type of clauses. AI-powered CMS can also aid in being in compliance with the ever-changing rules. NLP examines each document, highlighting the risks and opportunities.

solution provider contract management software

Are there templates that are standard for contract draft and editing?

best contract management software

The process of drafting contracts is among the most difficult tasks. How difficult would be to come up with documents with similar clauses, terms and conditions, words, and basically exactly the same content several of times. That's why your CMS will need to support templates and clause libraries that cover different fields. These templates, when approved by your editorial and legal teams, it is easy to draft contracts with no issues with language. Additionally, a plan to centralize and standardize contracts means you get an entire view of the contracts to trace them using filters you can alter and collaborate with other colleagues to review the documents, make edits and save them.

What is the potential ROI? What's the cost my organization can reduce costs?

The saving numbers are the largest argumentative factors that can help you determine whether you should spend money on a contract administration software or not. A study by Goldman Sachs concluded that an automated system for managing contracts can increase the speed of negotiations by 50 %, cut payment mistakes by 75 to 90 percent, reduce the cost for managing contract by between 10 and 30 percent and reduce the number of employees needed for contract management up to 20 percent. And yes, contract management could be an effective cost-effective choice, if it is chosen properly.

Ideally, you must take into account things like the amount of time on audits and tracking renewal dates, decreased disputes regarding contracts and creation of new business opportunities which will reduce sales cycle.

Does the solution have the ability to be adapted?

Each and every company on this market claim to offer solutions that are tailored to meet the needs of every company. But is that true? Instead of spending huge sums for customization, best contract management software consider a detailed breakdown of your workflow, processes that are crucial or improvements required, and investigate options by asking precise questions.

As an example: In a typical contract management workflow where the writer writes the documents the system routes the document to the person who approves. But, without limiting this basic functionality, a different approach might include an email including the document's hyperlink sent to the person who approves. And this link should support or be compatible with any device: smartphones, tablets, and desktops.

At the same time highly customizable software can cause a lot of hassle and be complicated in use. Its simplicity may also prove too little. Therefore, it's a good idea to look at how the software works and the capabilities of the team that will be using the software , and after that, decide on how to modify it.

What are some of the special features or highlights that could reduce manual work?

With a management tool for contracts, the contracts can be stored in a centralized, secure and searchable database that allows users to have access. This allows optimum compliance and extensive reporting. In particular, contracts could be easily traced, and the review and signing is made easier by e-signatures. Another option is metrics and analytics. To get information on how long it took negotiation of a contract, they will be able to analyze gaps, analyze the number of times it was necessary to iterate and produce comprehensive reports. It will also help in extending clause libraries, getting insights into historical performance and in making the process more efficient and reduce the cycle times of the contract.

Another crucial aspect to look at is the redlining of contracts or editing. Redlining is the act of highlighting text as a way to identify changes, additions to deletions, changes, approvals as well as rejections. This feature can be useful particularly when two or three people would like to work on the same document collaboratively. It offers greater range of flexibility in reviewing and negotiating contracts.

How simple is it to use and deploy?

A contract management program that has an intuitive interface with easy-to-use features will enjoy the admiration of your customers. To maximize your benefits when deploying, you should integrate it with current systems that cut down on the times spent moving between different platforms. Examples, for example, integrating CRM to the new software for contract management can enable sales people to supply customer data, make contracts , and distribute them to approval, as well as being in control of all renewals, expirations, and other important dates.

Following that, you should look for the process of onboarding. This is especially helpful if it's something that is available out of the box so that you can begin to live and operational within a few weeks' time. It is important to remember that lengthy deployment cycle are no longer viable.

7. Do the private and confidential information be safe?

In the last, but not least secure data storage is of vital importance. Contracts contain extremely confidential and sensitive information it is essential to protect them from access by anyone else to gain the trust of your network whether they are partners, vendors , or even customers. Additionally, the growing threat of cyberattacks and cyber threats are putting companies at risk of potential legal and financial liabilities as well as brand liability. If you're planning to retain the trust of your most important business relationships, double check that the provider hasn't been hit by any serious data breach.

Get in touch with our experts by emailing ask@vuram.com to find out what Vuram has to offer in its Contract Management Solution.