A contract management software drives the contract lifecycle throughout the request, creation, negotiation, and execution of the contract and ensures post-award contract management like compliance, renewals, and tracking. Automating the contract creation process reduces the susceptibility to error and reduces the chances for human error.
An automated contract management software provides customizable contract templates and pre-approved clauses that eliminate the use of improper contract formats or non-standard language. The financial implications of making mistakes in legal phrasing are huge. Therefore, it is necessary to have a provision that provides a safeguard against such errors. Standardizing the contract creation process makes it quicker to author clean contracts. Most of the contracts in an organization have varied clauses and styles. It is a very laborious task to draft many such contracts from scratch, as the contract authoring process is extremely time-consuming and prone to error if done manually. The number one priority of executive teams is for Legal to increase the speed of their delivery, as per the Gartner legal and compliance automation study.
To meet these demands, organizations should have Contracts solutions that have a clause library to automate the construction of new contracts beyond simple template storage/reuse. Automating the contract authoring process creates a repository of configurable templates and clauses which can be customized to suit the needs of a contract all along maintaining consistency throughout all contracts. Using configurable templates standardizes the contract language across contract categories and reduces the chances of errors. A comprehensive library of pre-approved clauses, which includes alternate and fallback clauses, makes the language uniform, setting a standard, and mitigates the risk of violating regulations or skipping details. This makes contract drafting and negotiation quicker. Considering the large and varied contracts global companies deal with monthly, it is essential to take quality, accuracy, and analytics to the next level and enable contracts to stand the test of ever-growing needs for faster execution.
One of the biggest pains in the contract process is workflows which can be made exponentially easier automation. When the contract authoring process is initiated, contracts are routed to the pre-configured workflows, ensuring faster review and negotiation progress. The system sends out alerts related to negotiation when a revision is due. It sends a notification when a contract needs to be, or when a contract must be completed to record revenue in a certain period. This way the enterprise won’t ever lose track of a contract, throughout the contract drafting process.
With its integrated and expanded AI approach, Zycus iContract drives increased productivity and effectiveness in deriving useful information from legacy and unstructured contract data. Zycus’s Merlin’s true Machine Based Learning – uses Subject Matter Expert feedback loop that leverages “Citizen Scientist” not Data Scientists. AI-driven Wizard for Intake Requests and Self-Service for a common or well-defined agreement that reduces the turnaround time and increases the accuracy of best first drafts. Some of the AI-assisted areas that make the authoring process self-service are:
Meta-data Normalization
Lack of structured outline with all the fields filled in during authoring can lead to several issues in the later cycle of contracts like search, compliance, and performance analytics. Zycus’s AI guides the author in creating a structured outline of metadata and normalizes values for consistency, common time, values, date formats to make analysis and comparisons easier.
Clause Library
Zycus’s AI Merlin Guide ensures quick and easy contract creation with intuitive drag and drop functionality for clauses from the standard library. It uses a comprehensive library of pre-approved clauses including alternate and fallback clause suggestions. It configures clause-based review approval workflows with parallel and ad-hoc reviews. Zycus’s robust clause management with system-driven usage of approved language from the clause library helps to track deviations, organize clause approval workflows, and manage different versions of contracts. The platform tracks all clause usage in templates and agreements to provide deeper insights.
Template Library
High compliance levels need to be ensured throughout the contract lifecycle. Set templates can create challenges when amendments and modifications are to be made, especially during the preparation of customized contracts. Using configurable templates standardizes the contract language across contract categories and reduces the chances of error. Zycus’s AI-Guide Merlin regularly updates the templates and clauses if there are any changes due to regulations, processes, or industry measures, under the guidance of the concerned domain experts with constant monitoring. It accelerates the contract creation process with template selection with the correct match to ensure risk mitigation.
Third-Party Contracts
Zycus’s AI-powered CLM solution has a Built-In Support for loading external agreements as part of the intake process to normalize the workflow when a 3rd party agreement is used as the baseline. It can parse through External Party Paper to extract key clauses, identify missing clauses, and add them by just a click. It also extracts metadata like expiry and renewal dates, payment terms, clauses, and obligations, etc. and provides workflow routing based on data values or differences between external agreement and preferred language.
This leads to faster authoring by preventing the author to check hundreds of pages in contracts and reduces the risk of managing third-party paper contracts at every stage—from initiation, review, and negotiations to approval, execution, and post-execution administration.
Commercial Terms and Details
Zycus’s AI-powered CLM solution helps to model commercial terms that can manage the increasing complexity of business contracts. A configurable data model lists the products and services, price lists, prices and discounts, incentives, and other related terms. It ensures stakeholder visibility while collating the most relevant commercial parameters in contract documents. This promises contract compliance, streamlines sales, and procurement operations from the contracting standpoint and makes the contracts revenue resilient.
