Analytics for Contract Management
Analytics is one of the new hot buzzwords in the technology forums. Opening any online or hardcopy tech journal today will include a few paragraphs buried between cloud computing and virtualization about what a company must do to enhance its analytics strategy.
Some years ago, data warehousing pundits complained about the proliferation of Excel spreadsheets and the amount of unstructured corporate data that filled these rows and columns. But the reality for many companies is simply that at some point the business grew out of from some sort of spreadsheet. The tool offers a simple means to query, analyze and visualize company data. Now, years later, the gurus have provided simple integration strategies to spreadsheets rather than calling for their boycott.
These same spreadsheets are where many companies store, sort, and track company contracts. A buyer could easily search for expiring agreements, sum all contracts for a particular supplier, and without too much difficulty, reference the terms and conditions. It was an affordable contract software and put off heavy expenditures on the part of the company in software implementation costs.
Implementation costs for contract management software for some of the major software vendors included hardware costs, software licensing, installation, training, and configuration. For some companies these costs represented millions of dollars and months or years of staff down time. Often an internal Information Technology department and outside business technology provider were required to successfully pull off such a project.
Today, trends in software development, delivery, and implementations have improved significantly to represent a shift away from massive software implementations to robust online products that can be implemented by business users over skilled technology implementers. In fact, in a recent review of Project Management software, Gartner Inc., found that “online offerings can enable departments or project teams to address their own specific needs without relying on the IT department at all.”
At Contract Logix, as a contract management software manufacturer, we have seized upon this idea to deliver a powerful software solution as a hosted online solution, software as a service (SaaS), or a traditional client-server model. The power of online solutions enables companies to implement in a very short period of time using the online or SaaS models because hardware, database, server, and other technology requirements are eliminated as implementation components. Business units take the forefront of learning and configuring the software to meet business processes that they own while validating that the software supports their mission critical tasks.
So the benefits of this software delivery model include reduced IT staff support costs, shorter implementation cycles, reduced hardware and software costs, reduced software lifecycle costs, and improved business user involvement.
The best way to experience the powerful features is to setup a free contract software demo. Contract Logix can help you explore the entire contract management process so that you can take control of the contract process to reduce costs and improve risk management. Full-featured analytical tools represent new levels of visibility into sales, value, trends, and historical performance, and if you need it in an Excel spreadsheet, that functionality is part of our standard package.
