The Steps of The Contract Lifecycle Management Process
Contract lifecycle management is the process of overseeing every step of a contract’s lifecycle, ensuring that tasks and obligations in each step are properly completed from contract creation until contract expiration.
By leveraging contract lifecycle management services, you can streamline every step of the contract lifecycle with several advanced features and automated contract workflows. With contract lifecycle management software, you greatly improve the speed, efficiency, and accuracy of your business’s contract management processes. Contract lifecycle management services help save both money and time so you can utilize your resources effectively. Mitigate risk, increase organization, and never lose track of critical deadlines or documents by implementing contract lifecycle management software.
Contract lifecycle management services that use SharePoint as the base for contract management are optimal due to the seamless nature of SharePoint as a business tool. With SharePoint, your business will improve results and performance because of how easily the platform allows you to link, store, and management contracts for all team members to access.
Let’s discuss each step of the contract lifecycle management process in more detail, and how contract lifecycle management services increase productivity, collaboration, and results.
Contract Template Authoring
The best contract lifecycle management software offers both preapproved template and clause libraries. With the help of a template library, your business can cut down on turnaround times and effectively store and use many templates that make contract management faster from the very beginning. By having a collection of preapproved contract templates, you directly mitigate contractual risk and increase compliance.
Contract templates are especially helpful because the user can insert preapproved clauses, metadata, and associated details into the document. Without effective contract lifecycle management software, the manual process of creating a contract can be lengthy and disorganized due to the need to collect several bits of data from various places when drafting the contract. Additionally, you can enable specific permissions for certain users to access the contract template library within your organization for an extra layer of security.
Contract Creation
Contract lifecycle management services offer solutions to all of your contract creation problems. One of which includes the step of contract creation, which traditionally is a bit more complicated. However, contract lifecycle management software makes this step fast and simple.
Specifically, our SharePoint-based contract lifecycle management solution utilizes automated contract workflows that can auto populate fields on contract templates with specific pieces of information — saving your business precious time and energy. With speedy and efficient contract creation, your business can improve contract lifecycle speed and improve overall performance.
Contract Review
In the contract review step, you ensure that contracts are designed properly for their specific purpose. During this critical step, contract lifecycle management software helps organize contracts and notify the appropriate parties to review the document through automated workflows. In this way, your contract reviews are consistently collaborative, thorough, and result in compliance prior to the contract moving onto the next step.
Contract Approval
A fast contract approval step is key to improving the turnaround times of contracts. With contract lifecycle management software, you decrease the tendency to delay within this step. Automated contract workflows that notify specific people of contracts needing their approval is a key feature of the best contract lifecycle management services offered today.
Sending a contract through a manual approvals process is very time-consuming, so using automated approvals can make all the difference in your company’s strategy and time-efficiency. Based on negotiations and various updates that are made on a document, these automated workflows will adjust as needed. In this manner, you the business owner can be fully confident in the ease of managing contracts during approvals.
Contract Execution
Executing contracts is easier than ever today. With contract lifecycle management services, you can sign contracts instantly with electronic signatures on any device, no matter where you are geographically. Our contract management system is integrated with the Sertifi eSignature solution, making signature capture seamless.
Electronic signature integrations are highly secure and are a component of automated contract workflows. Within the workflow, after a signature is captured, the signed documents are then uploaded, causing the document to update the data within the centralized contract repository post-execution.
Contract Performance
After a contract is signed, it’s very important that the contract is effectively tracked and monitored to ensure that the contract is being properly fulfilled. Overseeing contract performance means consistently evaluating the actions being taken according to the expectations for the contract. Other items pertaining to monitoring performance include minoring expenses and compliance.
Contract lifecycle management software allows the contract manger to review contract progress effortlessly because the software compiles all relating contract data into reports designed specifically for analysis. You can keep tabs on several key points of data, including factors relating to legal, financial, procurement, sales and more. Ensure that contract speed and cycle times are performing to standard, that risks are being managed properly, and that renewals and expiration dates are accounted for in a timely manner.
By identifying and tracking when tasks are completed, your business stays compliant to contract commitments. In addition, you can create or auto create commitments with Microsoft Office 365 applications and assign them to various people on your contract management team. After a contract is signed and fully executed, you can mitigate and manage contractual risks by reviewing contractual, performance, financial, and other pertinent data — keeping your contract lifecycle management system proactive and transparent to all parties involved.
Contract Expiration
Effective contract lifecycle management services provide alerts, notifications, and reminders regarding the most important dates and milestones that occur within a contract’s lifecycle. The most commonly tracked dates include the contract renewal and contract expiration dates. Having a user-friendly contract management dashboard helps your business stay in the know of every detail and date so you can stay prepared and ahead of pace.
Knowing when contracts renew and expire is crucial, as some contracts might contain autorenewal clauses that can financially impact your business. Proper contract lifecycle management software alerts the right people at the right times so that the last step of contract lifecycle management is painless.
The Benefits of Using Contract Lifecycle Management Services
Contract lifecycle management services assist your business in every step of the contract lifecycle. There are numerous benefits that these software solutions offer, including: reduce turnaround times, mitigate risk, streamline with automated workflows, enable notifications and alerts, leverage electronic signature capabilities, conduct accurate analysis and reporting, and use filtered searches within your centralized contract repository. A business owner equipped with all the information and tools for their contract lifecycle management processes will only increase the value of their product, having the competitive advantage that keeps clients returning.
Conclusion
You can utilize the best contract lifecycle management software today to help your business optimize and grow substantially. In every step of the contract lifecycle, choose to have the most efficient contract management solution with our software — equipped with SharePoint and Microsoft Office 365 integrations so you can take your contract management system to the next level.
We welcome you to leverage all the benefits that our Dock 365 Contract Management System has to offer. Maximize results, increase collaboration, boost productivity, and improve return on investment in your business with our SharePoint-based Contract Management System.
If you would like more information, we welcome you to schedule a demo with us today.
Originally published at https://blog.mydock365.com.