Managing your contracts is not just about making sure you’re on top of expiration dates and getting business done. Proper contract management is essential for any organization looking to minimize legal, financial, and brand risks. The benefits of using contract lifecycle management software goes well beyond just administrative organization. With CLM software, you can dramatically decrease the amount of time and resources required to manage your contracts by tracking and automating each step in a contract’s lifecycle.
What Is CLM Software?
You’ll see “contract lifecycle management software” go by “contract management software” and sometimes “digital contract management system.” CLM software gives a business the tools to manage its entire contract management process effectively. With CLM software, they can automate contract creation, negotiation, and approval. CLM software helps businesses simplify the process that includes:
- Requesting a contract
- Tracking that request
- Making sure the request has appropriate data
- Merging that data into the contract
- Getting the document signed and approved
- Monitoring the entire process through a graphical dashboard from request to renewal
- Administration of expirations and renewals
How Does Contract Lifecycle Management Software Work?
There are three elements involved in CLM Software:
- Intake of contract requests, which includes drafting contracts and using clause and template libraries.
- Executing contracts that involve negotiation, redlining, approvals, and signatures.
- Workflow automation and governance of a defined process for contract creation and execution.
Intake and Drafting
CLM software provides a simple contract request form for users to populate with basic data to begin the process.
There are also systematic tasks that can be used to populate a contract request. These systems have enough information where the CLM software can look for triggers and automatically get the data to create a new contract request rather than a user manually creating the contract request.
- OCR external contracts to capture data elements required for contract request.
- A CRM system with a project or opportunity in a certain stage.
- A new vendor in your ERP system that has a certain vendor type associated with it.
Once the request is submitted, there may be a “Review” or “Enhance” stage that makes sure any data required to build the draft contract has been captured. The contract request review and approval process is designed to ensure this data is correct before moving to the drafting stage. The draft contract can be created by dynamically populating data into the appropriate location of the pre-defined contract templates from the contract request. CLM software allows you to use a clause library so the contracts can be assembled faster, and you can eliminate deviations from the standard and required legal language. Business rules will determine which clauses to use under specific circumstances, and users can add clauses manually throughout the review and approval process. Roles-based security will regulate access to certain clauses and templates to ensure users can only do what is within their realm of authority.
Negotiate – Redline – Approve
This aspect of CLM software allows users to review the contract draft, negotiate with involved parties, and approve the draft. The solution enables users to perform the negotiation within the CLM software and to review and redline the contract externally with enterprise file sync and sharing.
eSignature technology within the solution or in conjunction with the solution (i.e. DocuSign integration) allows parties to securely and digitally sign documents which saves time compared to snail mail, scanning, email, or fax.
As documents are edited internally or externally, the system will store each revision as an audit trail. Major and minor revisions are kept so users can refer back to see what has been changed and at what stage in the process it was changed. A compare tool allows different revisions to be compared to show the differences between revisions.
Workflow
This part of CLM software is focused on processes that control and traffic a contract request throughout its lifecycle. You’ll be able to eliminate the need to manually track and facilitate each step, and workflows can differ by role, contract type, or data within a contract record. Other benefits include:
- Using task lists with calendar reminders and email notifications to accelerate the process.
- Building workflow stages and statuses with strict or ad-hoc approval chains using your business rules.
- Additional configurable actions that can be executed by users manually or automatically via system tasks.
- Ensuring governance and compliance of your contract lifecycle.
- Using reporting and dashboards to gain visibility into various stages of the lifecycle.
Subsequently, you’ll be able to track KPIs around how long each step in the workflow takes, pinpoint where process improvements can be made, and set expectations and timelines based on your benchmarks.
Graphically, the stages are easy to see when reviewing the contract request, including user names with data and time stamps. This graphical representation of the stages within the process shows where the contract request has been and where it is going.
If you have questions about how contract lifecycle softwarecan benefit your business, contact All Star Software. We provide contract lifecycle management to businesses of all sizes to save them massive money and time on their contract processes. Reach out to us today to learn more.
