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Contract Management

Contract Management: What You Need to Know

Contracts are a vital part of many businesses. Contracts play a significant role in defining relationships, transactions and business operations with clients, vendors, employees or partners.

Without robust contract management, they’re often a manual process that can be error-prone and costly. It can result in missed renewals and lost business revenue, among other issues.

Table of Contents

Tools

Contract management requires various tools and techniques to ensure compliance and reduce risk. It also includes key performance indicators to measure the effectiveness of the process and report on it.

Automated alerts for expiration dates, milestones and deliverable due dates keep everyone in the loop. It saves teams from wasting time and effort tracking contracts manually and ensures they stay on top of their obligations.

Using best-in-class contract management solutions by companies like Intuitive Edge helps businesses get more done and improve their sales processes. It also reduces manual efforts, eliminates room for errors, and frees personnel to focus on other business initiatives.

Contract management solutions with a central contract repository let users find contracts, clauses and client data in seconds. It also has intelligent document tagging and OCR capabilities to make searching easy. It also integrates with native eSignature and approval workflows. It also lets you build custom project workflows that route documents to the right people for review and approval.

Definition

Contracts are the documents that hold your business together — defining your relationships with customers, partners, vendors, employees, and more. They are also the key to maximizing your business’s value and financial risk.

Sadly, most companies must be prepared to handle these dynamic, data-rich contracts. Consequently, they spend excessive time on paper chasing, signature tracking, redline review, and other inefficiencies that save resources and slow the execution of broader business initiatives.

Managing contracts can dramatically reduce business risks and improve financial results by legally outlining the expectations and responsibilities of each party involved in an agreement. In addition, it can help companies build better relationships with their suppliers by giving them more control over compliance and performance.

Processes

Contract management encompasses creating, managing and sharing business contracts. It includes a range of processes for in-house legal and business users that enable automation, extracting actionable insights and reducing overall costs.

While the traditional method of managing contract documents through folder and file cabinet storage is riddled with inefficiencies, it’s still common to use a combination of Word, email, shared drives and eSignature to agree, negotiate and store contracts. It’s also common for companies to hire a specialist headcount to handle contract creation, negotiation and management if they don’t want to do it themselves.

A robust contract management process can reduce risk by preventing palmed-off replacements, scope creep, and cost and timeline creep before they occur, as well as ensuring contracts are not breached by regulatory or industry regulations. It can also help businesses build better relationships with their suppliers and contractors, enabling them to leverage their connections to benefit all.

Scope

Contract management is a cross-functional function encompassing strategy, sales, performance optimization, customer/supplier relationships, and more. It involves all aspects of business that rely on contracts, including legal counsel, procurement, finance, and HR.

The scope of contract management is more significant than most organizations realize, as it also includes the entire lifecycle of a contract, from pre-solicitation activities to contract closeout. It’s about maximizing value, productivity, and profit through every stage of a contract’s lifespan.

In addition, the ability to quickly assess and make strategic changes to a contract to improve profitability and operational efficiency is critical to contract management success. It’s a skill that requires interpersonal skills, networking, and strong working relationships within the organization.

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