Why Remote Access to Contract Data is Vital
The use of inadequate solutions for contract management is a key challenge across many industries, including manufacturing and business services. According to a Contract Logix survey of 550 U.S. individuals who are responsible for the creation, editing, and/or management of contracts at manufacturing companies, nearly one in four respondents either doesn’t know contract management software exists, or doesn’t know what to look for in a CLM solution.
To help you evaluate CLM software, let’s review why remote access to your contract data is one of the vital features to look for in a contract management solution.
Centralize and Secure Storage of Contract Data
While leveraging word processors and spreadsheet software is definitely a step up from sticking to paper forms, it still results in challenges for contract managers.
- In the Contract Logix survey of contract managers at manufacturing companies, 63.60% of respondents indicated that scattered contracts created a challenge for their companies.
- In a separate Contract Logix survey of 264 individuals responsible for contract management processes in the business services industry, 61.50% of respondents indicated dealing with scattered contracts as one of the most pressing issues in contract management.
Remote access to your contract templates and libraries of clauses empowers your organization to make more timely decisions, ensure usage of most up-to-date forms and clauses, and hedges against loss of data.
That last benefit merits particular attention; Whether it’s through your own servers or a third-party cloud-based storage solution, you can better ensure the integrity of your contract data with contract management software. It’s important to do a proper cost-benefit analysis of keeping the duties of data storage in house. One estimate puts between 30% and 40% the percentage of in-house IT departments that have no disaster recovery systems in place or don’t know how to implement existing ones correctly. Leveraging the storage services of a reputable CLM solution provider allows you to have access to top-tier data storage. For example, Contract Logix securely hosts your data in servers with Intelligent HVAC cooling, uninterrupted redundant power source, multi-level security and firewalls, and 24 x 7 monitoring; and provides you with a responsive technical support team.
Hedge Against Work Visa Bottlenecks
2017 started off with major headlines related to an issued executive order suspending the entry of all refugees to the U.S. for 120 days, halting admission of refugees from Syria indefinitely, and barring entry for three months to residents from predominantly Muslim countries of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. This piece of legislation caused a lot of uproar in several companies, such as Google which had nearly 200 employees affected by this immigration ban. There are many contract management lessons from that recent immigration ban.
However, your enterprise doesn’t need to have employees or managers from specific countries to have a potential immigration bottleneck. Consider these stats from the Kauffman Foundation:
- 28.5% of new entrepreneurs in 2014 were immigrants, up from 13.3% in 1997
- 24% of tech and engineering companies created from 2006 to 2012 have an immigrant founder
- 44% of companies created in Silicon Valley have an immigrant founder, including Whatsapp CEO Jan Koum and Instagram’s technical lead, Mike Krieger
- Immigrant founders from top venture-backed firms have created an average of 150 jobs per U.S. company
Imagine having your CEO stuck in London and not being able to interact face-to-face with key staff in your offices in California. That’s exactly the case of e-commerce company Snapdeal, a startup valued at $5 billion and employing 4,000 people, its CEO Gautam Sivakumar was stuck in limbo trying to secure a federal work authorization for several months.
As the current administration continues to review work visas, such as the H-1B visa and Extraordinary Ability work permit, having remote access to key contract data and ability to execute documents through e-signature software becomes a necessity for companies with foreign workers now or in the future.
Provide the Ability to Extract Key Data and Scope from Contracts
The Contract Logix survey of contract managers in the business service industry focused only on enterprises with at least $5 million in annual revenue and without a CLM solution in place. Among top of mind concerns of individuals in charge of contracts were a lack of visibility into scope of contracts (66.50% of respondents) and an inability to extract key data from contracts (64.30% of respondents).
Similar findings were found on the Contract Logix survey of the manufacturing industry: 63.84% of respondents mentioned the inability to extract key data from contracts and 61.95% of them mentioned the lack of visibility into scope of contracts.
The ability of CLM software to provide remote access goes beyond just accessibility, it allows staff to gain quick insights into key data, such as deadlines and renewal dates, and scope, such as specifics on mutually agreed milestones. By implementing a CLM solution, you’ll be addressing pressing needs from the individuals who are responsible for the creation, editing, and/or management of contracts at your enterprise.
To find more about how your peers at business services companies handle contract management, download the full report “Contract Management in the Business Services Industry: Roles, Tools, Challenges, & Obstacles”.
To find more about how your peers at manufacturing companies handle contract management, download the full report “Contract Management at Manufacturing Companies: Roles, Tools, Challenges, & Obstacles”.
