The technological advancements available today in contract management have made it entirely possible to automate and create more efficient pathways for daily contract-related operations. If your company fails to use the most current technology for your contract management processes, you're only setting yourself behind and making yourself less competitive. Have the edge with up-to-date technology that allows for an optimal contract management system.
Content:-
- Where Manual Contract Management Goes Wrong
- Key Reason #1: Missed Deadlines
- Key Reason #2: Lost Contracts
- Key Reason #3: Long Duration of Contract Lifecycles
- Conclusion
In contract management, it's important to streamline wherever possible so that you reduce time spent on daily tasks and routine actions that could be automated instead. Your contract management system should have flexibility, agility, and a high level of accuracy so that all contracts are compliant and designed properly. Contracts undergo extensive lifecycles that require tedious management and constant monitoring of their status to ensure that obligations are fulfilled, and that the contracts are being executed effectively and efficiently.
Your company should be able to transact optimally by having a rapid and efficient contract management system that allows you to easily build, negotiate, execute, and oversee your contracts with counterparties. It’s necessary to note that your company's bottom line is heavily dependent upon turnaround time and how long it takes to process sales. However, many companies rely on outdated, traditional, manual methods of managing contracts that drive several facets of their organizational operations.
If your organization utilizes email, shared drives, spreadsheets, or physical documents stored in filing cabinets, then you are ultimately inhibiting your ability to conduct a fast contract management process that allows for rapid transactions. By wasting time with a manual approach to managing contracts, you give your competitors an edge – as they use automated workflows another technological tools that aid in collaboration and communication. In this way, they clearly have the upper-hand to drive results, scale, and grow faster than you.
With how fast business moves today, transitioning to a digital contract management solution can seriously help your business maintain the competitive edge. With features including a centralized, cloud-based contract repository, workflow automation, automated expiration and renewal date reminders, contract and clause template libraries, and several other features, your business can reduce time spent manually locating contracts, looking up data, and overseeing critical deadlines. Automated contract management processes can significantly help in mitigating risk, therefore producing an impactful return on investment for your company.
Where Manual Contract Management Goes Wrong
A manual contract management system makes it incredibly difficult to oversee a large volume of highly complex contracts, no matter the size of the company in question. If your organization is required to follow several specified compliance policies, it can be very difficult to be fully compliant when managing contracts and related documents in a manual contract management system as opposed to a digital contract management system. By conducting contract management processes in the traditional and manual sense, you increase legal risk, bottlenecks, unnecessary delays, human error, and slower contract execution.
Now, we will discuss the three key factors to consider when adopting contract management software. These three reasons outline some of the most common issues that stem from a manual contract management approach.
Key Reason #1: Missed Deadlines
When regularly working with many, many complex contracts on a consistent basis, it can be challenging to effectively oversee and keep track of all of the important due dates at hand. In manual contract management, utilizing excel spreadsheets to keep tabs on auto renewal dates and expiration dates is simply a recipe for disaster. By monitoring deadlines in this outdated approach, you'll likely miss critical deadlines pretty often.
You could accidentally renew unfavorable terms or work under expired contracts which can greatly negatively impact your company both financially and reputation-wise. By transitioning to contract management software, you centralize all of these dates into a platform that allows you to stay aware of the important deadlines at all times. In addition, you can assign specific users to receive automated notifications and reminders based on any important date on the calendar.
Within the intelligent and user-friendly software solution, you can utilize a filterable calendar so that your contract management team members can easily gain insights on every upcoming date. Enable email notifications so that involved departments can stay aware for several months ahead of time, creating a proactive and risk mitigative approach to contract management overall.
Key Reason #2: Lost Contracts
Lost contracts mean lost business and lost opportunities. If you've ever struggled to find a contract or to locate an exact clause within your contract storage system, then you know what I mean. If you are unable to find a contract, then how are you able to be sure that your organization is fully compliant with the terms in the contract that is missing?
By failing to transition to an organized digital contract management system, you increase risk by storing documents full of confidential information in unsecure places like shared drives and desktops. An electronic contract management software system gives your organization a secure and centralized place for all of your company’s contracts and related documents to be stored. This offers your organization a single source of truth for all of your data.
Centralizing contract management helps in data and document loss prevention and helps in security and risk mitigation. Our contract management system offers a very secure cloud-based platform built into your Office 365 that protects your company’s documents and data from cyber security issues. Furthermore, our solution can provide seamless access to contracts with appropriate permissions-based access features so that your select employees and stakeholders can review, store, and access documents within just a few seconds.
Key Reason #3: Long Duration of Contract Lifecycles
Building, negotiating, executing, and all other actions related to contract lifecycle management can take several weeks if your company utilizes a traditional, manual approach to contract management. It might take even longer in actuality if you face additional roadblocks along the way. In many scenarios, several departments are involved in contract reviews, so performing contract reviews over emails can take a significant amount of time due to back-and-forth email communication.
Consider the time spent sifting through emails and shared drives... This can take up numerous employee work hours annually, where managing several different contract drafts can clearly lead to user error and unintentional discrepancies. Transition to a digital contract management system to reduce contract lifecycle times and to conduct the contract review process in a centralized place so that communication is clear and simple.
In a manual contract management process, contract views conducted through back-and-forth emails lengthen contract lifecycles and create unnecessary delays. Contract management software enables users to easily and efficiently use filtered and customized searches to reduce time spent searching through your repository for specific contracts, clauses, or other documents. Furthermore, contract management software offers numerous collaboration tools and other features, including version control and auditing trails that help maintain consistency in document versions.
Contract management can be one of the most expensive and labor-intensive internal operations that any company must oversee. A single contract can result in the gain or loss of thousands of upon thousands of dollars, so investing intelligently in a powerful and productive contract management software solution is imperative. If your company is considering implementing contract management software, we welcome you to start here with Dock.
Conclusion
Here at Dock, we are experts in SharePoint and Office 365 and want to help business utilize their features to revolutionize and streamline contract management. Our Contract Management System is equipped with several amazing features that will help improve the quality of your contract management processes with the help of a SharePoint and Office 365-based collaborative software interface. Improve business dealings, increase contract compliance, reduce bottlenecks and turnaround times, enhance risk mitigation efforts, and completely overhaul contract management team productivity for the better with our contract management software.
Ready to get started today? Reach out to us to learn more about our Dock 365 Contract Management System.
