3 Reasons for Data-Driven Contract Lifecycle Management
By David Parks
Given the tremendous focus on digital transformation, it’s time we start thinking about contracts as one of the most important collections of data that an organization can leverage for its business intelligence. Names, dates, terms, conditions, purchases, sales, insurance, you name it.
Contracts contain some of the most important information about a company yet so many are unable to leverage it in a meaningful way. They either don’t understand the value of their contract data or have legacy system in place that renders the data in their contracts useless.
Download the Essential Guide to Unlocking the Power of Your Contract Data eBook to learn more.
At Contract Logix, we firmly believe that data is your most valuable and insightful contract management asset. Here are just three of the many reasons for data-driven contract lifecycle management and some examples of how our contract management software makes them possible.
1. Increased Visibility into Your Business
It’s important to know where contracts are in your contract management process. It’s also important to know who’s working on them. With data-driven contract lifecycle management, you can visually track and report on the stage and status of every agreement. This allows you to quickly see what contracts are being drafted vs. negotiated vs. executed and what contracts are active vs. pending vs. terminated.
And not only can you see where they are in the process, you can see who’s doing what and the tasks each user has completed or needs to complete. You can also automate and customize contract workflows to ensure those contracts are moving through your processes efficiently and according to your business rules.
2. Never Miss Another Contract Obligation
Another big reason for data-driven contract lifecycle management is you can use contract data to automate reminders, tasks, and calendars so that the right people are always informed at the right time about any and all contract-related milestones. This helps mitigate contract risks such as missing the dreaded autorenewal for a product or service you intended to terminate.
Users can set up alerts based on any date field captured in a contract, not just standard dates like renewal or expiration. This also allows you to set up alert rules so that you can add alerts to many contracts at once vs. having to manually do it. You can also track and manage tasks to keep projects on time and hold those involved accountable.
3. Accelerate Contract Cycles
In most companies, contract requests happen over email because there is no centralized contract request system to leverage. This manual approach creates the risk of missed or inaccurate information and can quickly become unmanageable.
With a data-driven contract lifecycle management solution like Contract Logix’s, the use of standardized intake forms ensures that all the data required to request, submit, or begin drafting a contract is completely and accurately captured. This saves a lot of time in terms of back and forth information gathering and manual errors. It also allows you to convert the request into an actual contract so there’s no duplicating of efforts and reduces chance of duplicate requests.
The Contract Logix platform further eliminates bottlenecks by helping customers assemble and approve contracts faster with preapproved language and formats via clause and template libraries and contract workflows that follow your business rules. And finally, you can execute agreements remotely and digitally using electronic signatures and capture all the data associated with those signatures for audit purposes.
Takeaway
In today’s digital age, it’s critical that organizations understand the advantages and importance of data-driven contract lifecycle management. After all, contracts contain some of your most important data. It’s key that you’re able to leverage that information to deliver valuable and actionable business intelligence. Schedule a demo of our solution and we’ll show you just how easy it is to do with our platform.
