No matter what a company sells, produces, or where it is located… Every day, every organization creates, modifies, performs, and checks their own contracts, be it for their customers or suppliers.
As a matter of fact, managing contracts in a company is a routine but, above all, it is vital for its success… Still, it’s a time-consuming and delicate task for its business users: Are the contract clauses up to date? Which clauses can I include or modify? Am I doing this right?
And while business users are asking themselves thousands of questions, potentially generating bottlenecks in the revenue cycle, the legal team is stuck, with never-ending searches for documents, data updates and information checks… something that, most of the time, is done manually. The result? Unmet deadlines and inaction that caused disputes and complaints that otherwise could have been prevented.
That’s why automating contract management should be near the top of your digital transformation goals… And relying on the best tools should definitely be a priority!
Thanks to its ability to digitize business processes, deliver highly efficient solutions to end-users, securely store and file information, OpenText Extended ECM is the ideal choice to centralize contract management and be the only source of truth for all your corporate contracts.
And by leveraging and enhancing its brilliant capabilities, we’ve created Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM): our first vertical solution for the proper contract lifecycle management, fully configurable to meet unique business requirements.
CLM bridges every contract phase from creation to execution (…and beyond!), thereby, greatly automating and streamlining contract processes on Extended ECM.
Create clause libraries and contract templates
CLM enables legal teams to smoothly create new contract clauses and their variations, which are later efficiently organized and assembled to generate standardized contract templates. This translates into proactively providing business users with pre-approved contracts, while conforming to corporate standards.
Generate a contract draft
By choosing from the library of pre-approved contract templates, the business can select the contract type. Agreement-specific information can then be easily collected (e.g., customer information that is directly fetched from external sources, like a CRM, a local database, or a simple Excel file, to ensure data accuracy).
The contract draft is then ready! Simple as that!
Approve the revised draft
But what if the business user has to enter specific information or clauses that need to be approved by the legal team? No need to worry! We’ve thought about this too!
With CLM, business users can now trigger an internal workflow to have the reviewed contract approved. The legal user receives a notification to go over the changes made. A final, already approved version of the document will be then automatically generated and stored in the relevant folder.
Negotiate, sign, and perform the contract with the relative stakeholder
Changes to individual clauses (e.g., language used, payment terms etc.) can be effortlessly made to support negotiation. Once all the necessary information is there…it’s time to sign!
CLM supports a variety of digital signature technologies – including Core Signature and DocuSign. However, other digital signature solutions can be easily integrated as well.
Keep track of post-execution actions
Contract lifecycle is far from being over, once the document has been approved and performed. Obligations must be monitored, clause deviations tracked, potential risks assessed, and data from the process must be archived and analyzed.
CLM includes renewal and obligation management, archiving, monitoring and reporting to always keep an eye on the contracts in the most secure and automated way, even after their execution.
Sleep soundly and rely on CLM!
In short, with the Contract Lifecycle Management solution for Extended ECM you will quickly create new agreements compliant with corporate standards, thereby cutting down the time and effort needed for routine and manual tasks.
Last but not least, you’ll have better control over your contracts, assessing and managing risks at all stages of the lifecycle.
Find out more about CLM or contact us to request a demo
