Contract management is an integral component to any industry or business. Contracts are legally binding documents that serve as a foundation for regular business operations and are critical to risk mitigation. With the growth of any business comes an increase in contract volume. To ensure your business can scale and efficiently grow, we suggest implementing contract management software to streamline all contract-related duties.
With traditional manual contract management systems, businesses were obligated to perform working functions on shared drives, organize data on Excel spreadsheets, and store contracts as physical copies in file cabinets. All of these methods increase risk and are highly inefficient, placing insurmountable amounts of undue stress on contract management departments. As your business scales and contract volume compounds, the work placed on your internal teams is dramatically increased and requires more attention to effectively managed contract-related processes. In this way, it is evident that business should utilize the best, most organized, and collaboration-friendly contract management software solution.
Give your business the best possible foundation so you can confidently scale your contract management processes. Through workflow automation and increased organization, managing every single step of contract lifecycles can become incredibly simplified.
Now, let’s take a look at 5 specific processes that contract management software can substantially streamline.
Content-
- Improves Organization
- Centralizes Collaboration
- Increases Security
- Manages The Contract Renewal Process
- Stabilizes Various Business Functions
- Conclusion
Improves Organization
To have a competitive and high performing contract management system, it is absolutely essential that the system is properly organized. In this way, your system is capable of effectively managing contracts and client data, as the main advantage of contract management software is how is helps companies maintain accessible and visible documents and data. With the help of SharePoint, cloud-based centralized repository, your company can keep every contract in a single place. In this manner, you don’t have to worry about documents getting into the wrong hands or being improperly stored or misplaced. Within your centralized contract repository, you can create categories of contract groups and tag documents according to agreement type or other details. Your centralized repository serves as a single source of truth for all of the contracts and data that swirl in your organization’s contract management department. Our repository is additionally equipped with advanced search and custom filtering functions so that you can find even the most sparingly used clauses – saving your team time, energy, and resources.
A contract management system with fragmented data and document storage is only bound for failure. A centralized repository inherently increases overall organization and cohesiveness of data by placing documents in a standardized and organized system. While managing contract lifecycles, especially as your business scales, its inevitable that data will find itself fragmented at some points. However, by using a contract repository you substantially decrease disorganization and data fragmentation – especially when compared to traditional contract management processes. With every new contract, or when an existing contract is modified, your business is required to collect more data by creating more spreadsheets. Using spreadsheets is especially risky, and when contracts become more complicated, it can be a human error that leads your business to overwrite existing spreadsheets or to lose transparency and visibility in your contract management practices. Utilizing a centralized contract repository will help in contract and metadata storage and management on a large scale. Additionally, contract metadata can be uploaded into the repository for contracts that are both new and pre-existing.
Centralizes Collaboration
Every document will be reviewed by various parties spanning across several different departments. It’s important that during these reviews that communication isn’t inhibited by technology, but that it is enhanced. Procurement, legal, sales, operations, finance, and other departments are all involved in contract reviews to some degree, so with the optimal contract management software you can ensure that internal collaboration is seamless and productive. With improper management of contract reviews, communication can be broken and documents can be improperly edited or lost entirely. With contract management software, you can conduct contract reviews within your cloud-based SharePoint platform so that any employee can access certain documents at any time, any place, on any device. Our contract management software is additionally equipped with version tracking capabilities so that the most recently updated document is available. With all of this in mind, you contract review processes can be completed faster and more efficient than ever. When it comes to approvals and negotiations, workflow automation features such as redlining, email integrations, and “@” mentioning are available for all parties to use so that communication runs smoothly and collaboration is effective.
Increases Security
Contract management software is phenomenal for increasing security and mitigating risk so that your organization stays protected. With a SharePoint and Microsoft 365-based platform that capitalizes on keeping your data secure, your company will prevent against data breaches while increasing overall compliance. Our Contract Management System has several security features including audit trails, cloud security and storage, permissions-based access control, SharePoint Backup, encryption, and constant monitoring to keep your business protected. Within the cloud, you can manage, send, and store documents and ensure that they are always accessible with backups. Permissions-based access controls are also important to a secure contract management system. Contracts are highly confidential documents with accompanying requirements to maintain their privacy. With access control, you can enable or disable access to documents within your library. Use administrative permissions features to easily set access capabilities to certain people within your business.
Manages The Contract Renewal Process
Contract management software stands out in its ability to create smooth-running contract renewal workflows. In an organization that consistently deals with a high volume of very complex contracts and related documents, a simplified renewal process can make all the difference and determine the success and results of your contract operations. At times, renewals and expiry deadlines can be missed. When critical dates are missed, it’s a sign of a larger issue, and certainly means that your business is increasing the risk of renewing terms that will reap negative impacts in the future. Contract management software provides you with automated reminders and alerts so a date is never missed again. You can assign users with these notifications so that they are proactive and aware of key deadlines.
Stabilizes Various Business Functions
Contract management is a fundamental piece to the overall business puzzle. Contract management software serves to assist in areas where contract management intersects with several operations, like customer relationship management and vendor management for example. With contract management software that can be utilized in concert with other business and productivity platforms, you can seamlessly manage and gain insights on all business functions and drive your results in other business areas from your contract platform as the base. By capitalizing on developing an aerodynamic and effective contract management process, you can prepare your business to scale overall.
Conclusion
As Microsoft partners, we are experts at helping business leverage SharePoint and Office 365 features to revolutionize and streamline contract management. Our Contract Management System is equipped with several amazing features that will help improve the quality of your contract management processes with the help of a SharePoint and Office 365-based collaborative software interface. Improve business dealings, increase contract compliance, reduce bottlenecks and turnaround times, enhance risk mitigation efforts, and completely overhaul contract management team productivity for the better with our contract management software.
Ready to get started today? Reach out to us to learn more about our Dock 365 Contract Management System.
If you would like more information, we welcome you to schedule a free demo with us today.
