Managing contracts is challenging, constraining, and complex. Large enterprises often encounter the same common issues that slow down the entire contracting process. With multiple ongoing contracts and stakeholders across many divisions, legal teams need to be extremely efficient and ensure that the contracts are authored in a manner that leads to better decision-making and boosts the company’s profitability and brand value. In the absence of a proper CLM system, the significant areas where enterprises encounter challenges are:
- Contract Approvals– Without a suitable tool, contract approvals can be cumbersome involving endless emails, hallway conversations, and a lot of back and forth.
- Clause Management– Clause management can be challenging with disconnected software tools that are not as effective or efficient in generating accurate documents and rarely lead to fast approvals.
- Workflows– Without automated workflows and visibility into the workflows, stakeholders are often unaware of where the contracts are stuck or whom to reach out to, for accelerating the process.
The risks associated with these losses in these areas are massive. Contract breaches due to primitive contract management in the absence of robust Clause Management can result in loss of reputation and financial damages. Some of the problems that arise in the absence of a self-service contract authoring process are:
- Longer and unstructured authoring cycle -Contract authoring is a sequential process, and the lack of an efficient CLM software can increase the time taken to author a single contract.
- Inefficient Negotiations -Increased cycle time can lead to delayed negotiations, which can ultimately result in significant losses for the enterprise.
- Lack of collaboration -Haphazard management of the contract authoring cycle can result in inefficient communication between the contracting parties resulting in primitive collaborative systems.
- Increased risk of performance failures due to over or under-commitment – Missed deadlines due to the slow contract authoring cycle can result in performance failure, which will ultimately affect the enterprise’s reputation.
- Disagreements over scope, pricing, and negotiation- Rudimentary contract authoring techniques will leave less time for analyzing and reviewing the contract via detailed negotiations, ultimately lowering the document’s quality and reliability.
Zycus’s AI-driven Contract Lifecycle Management Software helps enterprises to achieve faster time to revenue, improves cycle times, and significantly reduces legal operating expenses by allowing users to create contracts in self-service mode. Administrators can help set up clauses, templates, and business rules. Enterprises can safely and efficiently initiate their contracts and contract actions, once clause and template libraries and business rules are established. This reduces administrative overhead and accelerates the contracting process.
Contract Approvals-
In a basic contract management system, professionals often over-engineer their processes. They may send out multiple email alerts that may not be as meaningful. This can lead to users becoming desensitized to all the email alerts and, at the same time, ignore the important ones. This can lead to significant delays, but the advanced process of Zycus’s AI-driven CLM solution provides unlimited granularity to notifications and process workflows by:
- Creating dynamic, user-friendly workflows depending on the type of contract as per the exact business requirement
- Creating sequential contract approval processes so that multiple parties can work on their respective contract components and approvals in parallel
- Coupling compliance management workflows with business rules, related decision points, and approvals process to streamline corporate governance and standards/regulatory controls
Clause Management-
Clauses support standards and reduce risk, and, when used to their potential, they can have a positive impact on your contract management process. Hence, it is essential to standardize clauses throughout the company contracts to avoid contract and compliance risks.
Zycus’s AI-driven CLM solution configures clause-based review approval workflows with parallel and ad-hoc reviews. It ensures quick and easy contract creation with intuitive drag and drop functionality for clauses from the standard library.
- Robust clause management with system-driven usage of approved language from the clause library tracks deviations, organizes clause approval workflows, and manages different versions of contracts
- Tracks all clause usage in templates and agreements to provide deeper insights
- Uses a comprehensive library of pre-approved clauses including alternate and fall-back clause suggestions
Automated Workflows-
One of the most critical steps of any CLM process is reviewing the contract itself. With contract workflows, you can easily define who needs to consider a contract and apply special conditions for certain agreements or obligations. This ensures that the right people are involved in the contract drafting process at the right time, based on several conditions such as values, terms, or document types as required by your business processes.
Without visibility into the workflows, stakeholders are often unaware of where the contracts are stuck or whom to reach out to, to accelerate the process. Zycus’s AI-powered solutions take center stage here to:
- Automate workflows, improve visibility, and generate alerts to avoid delays
- Speed up the negotiation stage by enabling transparency and automation in user workflows
- Clear the path for accessible two-way communication for faster negotiations
- Mitigate risks encountered due to delays by reducing the turn-around time
Zycus iContract, with its integrated and expanded AI approaches, drives increased productivity and effectiveness in deriving useful information from legacy and unstructured contract data-stores. Zycus iContract enables legal and compliance teams to quickly and accurately assess the state of their contract repository and create action plans to address non-compliance.
