4 Ways to Leverage Contract Management Software
Any organization with contracts should make use of a contract management system. Benefits include mitigating risk, increasing compliance, and finalizing business faster. According to the Association of Corporate Counsel’s (ACC) 2020 Legal Operations Maturity Benchmarking Report, contract management is considered a core legal operations function. Therefore, it is imperative to have a solution for this function.
Even with a solution, however, many businesses are not utilizing or able to leverage contract management software to its full potential. This can be detrimental to security, collaboration, visibility, workflow, and obligation management. How can a company get on the right track to contract management functional maturity? This article will examine four of the many ways to take advantage of and leverage contract management software.
Key takeaways:
- Contract management software digitizes and improves many of the tasks involved with contract management, ensuring that your business is always on top of your contracts
- Centralizing all your contracts and data in a secure and accessible cloud-based repository is critical
- CLM software should also be leveraged to automate workflows, draft contracts more effectively, and eliminate missed obligations
- When properly leveraged, contract management software like Contract Logix helps businesses mitigate risk, increase compliance, and finalize business faster
Four Ways to Leverage Contract Management Software
In order to reach a high maturity level in contract management functionality, there are several key factors to implement that will vastly improve your business’s contract lifecycle management. Here are four important ones but there are others as well.
1. Centralize and Secure Your Contract Data
Several departments and individuals can work on a contract, which can cause issues if your contracts are scattered throughout the organization. Where is the latest copy? Is it in an email thread? Is it in a department drive? Is it in a filing cabinet? Having copies of a contract in different locations is risky.
That’s why it’s critical you leverage contract management software to centralize all of your contracts, documents, and contract data in a secure and cloud-based repository. This will enable a number of critical benefits:
- Security: you can regulate access to all of your sensitive contract information with roles-based and features-based permissions, encryption, multi-factor authentication, single sign-on and more.
- Searchability: with a data-driven solution like Contract Logix, you can easily search contract keywords and find information related to contracts extremely quickly.
- Accessibility: since all your contracts and data is centralized in the cloud, people with the right permissions can access it from any device.
- Reporting and Analytics: again, with a data-driven solution, you can sort, filter, and report on all your contracts by any relationship you want like contact, organization, contract type, etc. You can also generate reports and leverage dashboards to track KPIs and improve your performance.
2. Draft Agreements Using Clause and Template Libraries
Another important way to leverage contract management software in the pre-award phase of CLM is to build out your clause and template libraries directly in the system. This way, all of your standardized and approved legal language and formats are centralized and accessible by those who need them.
From there, you can apply business to how your contracts are assembled using those clause and template libraries. This let’s you build negotiation-ready contracts much faster and also ensures that you and the team are always using the latest and correct language in your agreements. It’s another excellent example of how contract management software from Contract Logix mitigates risk, increases compliance, and helps finalize business faster.
3, Automate Workflows throughout the CLM Process
Slow and inefficient processes are not only a headache, they introduce risk to a business. What if someone doesn’t follow the right process for reviewing or signing a contract? That’s why if you have contract management software, you should implement automated workflows to ensure your business rules are always followed for contract approvals, requests, signatures, and more.
With automated workflows, you can easily and quickly route contracts, tasks, requests, and reminders to the right people every time. For example, if you have a business rule that contracts over a certain dollar value need to be sent to the CFO for approval, you can simply build a drag-and-drop workflow for that using Contract Logix’s Visual Workflow Builder. It’s a simple, yet highly effective, way to eliminate the risk and inefficiency of routing contracts at various stages manually and via email.
4. Eliminate Missed Dates and Obligations with Alerts
Tracking and adhering to key dates, milestones, and other obligations associated with a contract can be a huge challenge and area of risk for any organization. That’s why using automated alerts is a very important way to leverage contract management software.
For example, perhaps you have a contract with a vendor that is an auto renewal but you would like to evaluate that agreement 3-months prior to its renewal date. That contract may have a 30-day termination window that you need to keep an eye on as well. With Contract Logix, you can easily automate the alerts and notifications associated with important dates like those. You can also automate alerts for other obligations such as the need to send a client a quarterly report that’s part of the Statement of Work (SOW) or perhaps a commitment in a facilities agreement to check the maintenance schedule of certain equipment. Whatever the obligation, date, or milestone, you can automate alerts so you never miss them.
Improve Your Contract Management with Contract Logix
Obtaining contract management software like Contract Logix is a very important step to having an efficient and effective contract management process. However, to reap the benefits of the software, it is important to make full use of its features, such as a secure and accessible central repository, clause and template libraries, and automated workflows, and alerts, to name a few.
To become familiar with Contract Logix’s robust and user-friendly software and onboarding process, feel free to schedule a live demonstration. You are also welcome to schedule a meeting to discuss your company’s needs and see how Contract Logix can meet them.
