CLM that works like a charm with advance search capabilities
One of the most sought-after topics in contracting today is how to make contracting a competitive advantage to get the most out of your contracts while making the contract process a real differentiator for your business. When legal departments think about getting more revenue or cost reductions when considering the benefits of contracting today, it’s all about mining data in your contracts to help to drive faster and better business outcomes that’s where technology and automation comes.
5 signs that you are contracts are being treated as remote history-
- Post sign-off, are your contracts being tucked away in computer files, shared folders or worse in cabinets?
- Are your contracts dug out only at the time of customer or supplier audit, or when old contracts are being reviewed?
- Do you have no way to monitor or measure your contract’s performance?
- Do you have poor or zero visibility into your contract’s lifecycle?
- Is finding old contracts difficult?
Enterprises are at different levels of maturity in their journey of managing contracts and the way they access their contracts in real-time. About 90% of the organizations have their contracts tucked away in computer files and shared drives.
What does it matter in today’s day and age?
There are some common trends that we see:
- Globalization – In the past decade businesses have been expanding rapidly across the globe. Inaccessibility of contact documents across locations create disparities in pricing and compliance, thereby leading to untraceable leakages in cost and revenues.
Operations are being distributed globally; the needs of the global economy are certainly different terms conditions pricing structures methods of doing business are so dramatically different. It creates inaccessibility challenge as the documents are remote, they’re stored differently, they’re stored in different systems. It really takes a lot of work to be able to mine, gather and maybe harmonize this information across the disparate environments.
- Increased and fast changing regulations – With the ever changing and updating environmental regulations and state and federal level compliance standards, forgetting contracts post-signing will only expose enterprises to increased risks and losses.
There’s a tremendous need to be able to go in and identify what contracts are now putting your organization at risk that were not perceived as risky when they were first executed. Simply because the climate has changed and there are new regulations that impact your existing contracts.
- Multiple Organizational Systems – Large companies today have systems dedicated to different areas like CRM systems, billing systems, ERP systems, etc. A CLM solution with no integration with these systems lead to a lack of communication and visibility amongst stakeholders, thereby reducing accountability.
How to turn contracts into modern metrics for post-award contract management with advance search capabilities?
Extract metric and milestones to better manage the performance of the parties involved against the contracts because after all the contracts are the source of truth of the relationship between multiple parties and if we can overcome our past behavior of leaving them stuck in a shared drive or a common folder.
According to McKinsey, 75% of today’s contracts lack key performance indicators and calculations for total cost of ownership, which was once again proved in a survey conducted by Zycus where the percentage of compliant contracts was identified at the very important metric for contract management teams as compared to the reduction in contract author a cycle time.
- Convert contracts into accessible structured data by not just centralizing but also digitizing by making use of customizable dashboards for visibility into all important contract information. Search and extract milestones-based triggers and alerts for any upcoming deadlines, payments, renewals, etc. Enjoy ease and advance search options to search any contract information anytime, with structured metadata tagging.
- Connect your contracts to enterprise-wide systems for collaboration by using robotic process automation for request intake form everyday business platforms – MS Outlook, CRMs, External party portal, etc.
- Configure custom metrics and milestones to track contractual obligations by deep searching the contracts’ metadata and assigning the milestones and metrics to respective stakeholders to ensure accountability rests with the right person.
- Stay in control of compliance by streamlining post-award compliance management with clause level tracking for environmental, state, federal and international regulations. Speed up responses to the changing regulations by identifying compliance gaps, modifying existing contracts and updating stakeholders.
- Leverage risk analysis on the contract data with AI by identifying and acting on the contract text risk where specific changes to text can be search and it can secure your enterprise against losses or penalties. Assess contract party risk using past trends and data from complementary business systems.
- Champion a culture of excellence and performance with the help of reports extracted on metrics that are key to your business stakeholders e.g., contract utilization report, contract commercials report, risk analysis report, and more. Show a reduction in contract management operations cost and illustrate savings captured and impact to revenue.
Contract search and extraction are arguably the two must-have features for any Contract Management solution. Zycus iContract excels at both – and at scale. When organizations deal with thousands of contracts, it is essential for them to accurately and quickly interpret the information and structure it based on hierarchy, affinity, format normalization, etc. This is where the software’s true Machine-based Learning can be a game-changer.
To know more about how Zycus AI-enabled solution helps mitigate risks associated with inflation, sign up for a demo.
