Every business has contracts. Most still rely on manual and paper-based methods to create, edit, and track contract execution and then struggle with searching and retrieving contracts when needed. Contract management solutions enables companies to automate essential processes to better management the contract lifecycle and satisfy auditing requirements.
As you begin to evaluate a contract management solution for your business, here are the top 5 items you should make sure your solution provides:
- Make it a Process: It may sound obvious but many firms have yet to fully define and standardize what their process should be for managing a contract throughout its lifecycle. The ability to effectively automate your contract management begins with defining processes for routing, tracking, storing, and other workflows.
- Make it Personal: The beauty of technology today is that we can make user experience ultra-relevant. As a General Council, being able to log-in to your contract management site and easily view what contracts you are working on along with your specific tasks and deadlines enables you to be more effective and efficient.
- Make it Collaborative: Many editing and approval processes get slowed down by not having the right people engaged in the right conversation at the right time. Disparate emails conversations create inefficiencies that hinder the overall process. Solutions that promote team collaboration result in faster processing times and quicker business decisions.
- Make it Mobile: There are now more mobile devices than people on earth and businesses have been irrevocability changed by mobile. Any new solution needs to empower users to edit, approve, and find contracts as well as collaborate with colleagues and monitor status from any device.
- Make it Easy: Let's face it, the success of a software solution most often relies on user adoption. A successful contract management solutions is easy to use with minimal training and makes it simple to find what you need.
It is important to make an investment in the right contract management solution to enable your team to have better controls, transparency, and auditing capabilities. The cost can be a hurdle however, leveraging an existing technology investment, such as with Intellinet's Contract Management Automation solution, can help support your business case.