Businesses have entered the era of Digital Transformation and are looking at technology to help them maintain a competitive edge in all spheres of their day to day operations. Contracts are no different. However, few forward-looking enterprises have managed to translate thought into action when it comes to true technological transformation of their contract lifecycle management processes.
To understand where enterprises in the US and Canada stand on the contract management maturity curve, Zycus recently surveyed the Legal Operations and Contract Management professionals primarily from companies with annual revenue of over $1 billion. The survey results bring about interesting insights, considering these organizations already have a high monthly contracts volume, and a complex contract management process.
BELOW AVERAGE CLM MATURITY
Although a few enterprises exhibit adoption of advanced CLM technologies such as KPI tracking and ERP integration for contractual performance assessment, majority still operates on outdated platforms such as Shared Drives, Email Folders and Document Management Systems.
SEARCHING FOR CONTRACTS A BIG PAIN AREA
Due to presence of sub-standard mechanism for centralizing the contract database, access and visibility are compromised. Disconnected and disparate systems for storage on one hand and PDFs emailed as attachments in the name of digitization on the other hand set the stage for hampered search abilities
MILESTONES DIFFICULT TO TRACK
With most enterprises storing contracts as PDFs and Word Documents, it is not surprising that they highlight milestone tracking as a challenge. Obligation reporting and alerting mechanisms require contracts and the clauses in there to be truly digitized into living, active sources of everyday references which is not possible when they are tucked away in shared drives.
COMPLIANCE IS CRITICAL
Among the four key contract management metrics covered in the survey, tracking the percentage of compliant contracts is of greatest significance to the heads of legal operations in today’s enterprises. To understand how Zycus’s AI-based CLM solution drives compliance, take a look at the following resources: Revenue Recognition with Zycus iContract or Zycus iContract for GDPR Compliance.
49% STILL ON THE FENCE FOR AI-BASED CLM ADOPTION
Although Artificial Intelligence has proven its worth in contract management transformation by way of contract parsing, semantic analysis of clause language, automated metadata tagging and much more, many enterprises indicate being still at the exploration stage of this advanced technology.
HIGH VALUE YET POOR COMPETENCE
Although over three-fourths of the respondents say contract management is highly valued in their organization, less than one-fifth feel they are very competitive in satisfying the needs of their employees. This aligns with the low level of technological maturity which becomes a key barrier in dealing with rising stakeholder expectations in day to day contract management operations.
To get more in-depth insights into each of these observations, and interesting statistics around multiple contract management metrics and challenges.
