We ended 2016 with a couple of blog posts about smart contracts and blockchains – the technology driving such contracts and how smart contracts are different from traditional contracts. This week, we pick up the thread to have a glimpse at a few real-world examples of smart contracts in action.
Let’s take these pain points from a technology point of view and understand how contract lifecycle management software benefits the whole organization by accelerating the sales closing cycle.
- They need to simplify agreement drafting/assembly
- They want to automate the template selection process
- They would like the approval and review workflows to be automatic, but flexible and extensible
- They need to make sure that the process cannot be avoided
- They want it integrated into their current process and current system landscape
- They need it to be seamless and require no re-training
- Basically, they want to change the outcome without changing team behavior. (Okay, that comment may seem dramatic)
Learn More: Contract Lifecycle Management Solution
The first two are closely related. Easing the authoring/assembly process and automating the template selection process are linked together. By using the context of the sales activity, a good Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution can recommend/select the ideal template. Context may include the company’s business unit, the customer region, the product or service type, etc.
Further, specific conditional clauses can be automatically inserted based on additional specifics. Examples might include:
- Payment method-specific clauses
- State-specific clauses
- Regulatory required statements based on individual products or services and the like
We have seen companies transform from more manual processes into more highly automated processes by virtue of increasing their use of configurable templates and leveraging conditional clauses.
Mandating Approval and Review workflows, and automating them, are also linked together.
These data points are also tied, albeit indirectly, to process and systems integration.
By first determining the use-cases for, and then documenting the optimal business process of the approval process, the total number of workflows can be reduced, while adding conditional routing provides the flexibility required.
A graphical UI tool without the CLM provides a strong visualization that supports the stakeholder collaboration required to make short work of determining the optimal paths while capturing the rules and conditions.
This process may also identify which agreement types, under certain conditions, may be entirely automated for hands-free processing.
Mandating workflows is a matter of process and systems integration including quite a few items in the checklist.
Here’re Some Workflow Automation Benefits of Contract Management that Sales Teams Love!
- Mandatory Automatic Submittal on specific button Click vs. Submittal on save / close
- Initiating the workflow in real-time or batching
- Predetermine Individual Assignments or using role pools
- If using role pools – round-robin assignment within or allow selection
- Monitoring / Tracking and Alerting non-compliant response and turn-around times
More on process and systems integration and the impact on user adoption in our next post.
Related:
Learn about Zycus’s Post Award Contract Risk Management Solution.
Schedule a demo to learn more about Zycus iContract software for enterprises.
Contact us at info@zycusicontract.com to get your contract management concerns addressed.
