The most commonly used workflows include approval workflows, status workflows, notification workflows, and automation workflows. Each workflow type serves a specific purpose to increase efficiency and productivity within your business’s contract management system.
Content:-
- What is contract management workflow?
- Contract Management Workflow Automation
- Highlighted Features of Contract Management Workflows
- How to Configure Contract Management Workflows in SharePoint
- The Advantages of Workflows in Contract Management
- Bottom line: Contract workflows create pathways for faster and more efficient contract management. The results?
- Contract Management is a Thorough, Time-Consuming, and Tedious Job – Workflows Can Help
- Conclusion
What is Contract Management Workflow?
Contract workflow or contract management workflow is the series of steps and processes involved in the contract lifecycle, from creation to negotiation to approval to signing to management. It defines all the actions and stages involved parties must go through for a contractual agreement to achieve its purpose. Contract management workflows are complex for any business, as they span departments, stakeholders, and platforms.
Clearly defining the duties and accountable parties for each stage is essential to ensuring a smooth contract workflow. They assist companies in routing the document to the desired party at the right time, guaranteeing the contract's successful progression throughout its lifecycle. Some common workflows in the contract management process include review workflow, approval workflow, execution workflow, and so on.
Contract Management Workflow Automation
In contract management workflow automation, a contract is sent through a specified process of steps that notify multiple people or parties of what actions to take on that specific document. Each action a person takes within the workflow will impact the next step and action that follows – altering the course of the contract. The main objective of an automated contract workflow is to fully complete the contract lifecycle with as much ease and accuracy as possible.
By using workflows, you ensure that tasks and specific actions are systematized and standardized via notifications that alert the right people when an action is required. At Dock, you can stay engaged in every step of the contract lifecycle management process by keeping tabs on the status of contracts and where they are located within individual lifecycles.
Highlighted Features of Contract Management Workflow Automation
- Connect with platforms (Google, HubSpot, Office 365, etc.)
- Cloud-based
- Automated notifications
- Custom reporting
- eSignature integrations
- Workflow pattern templates
- Control permissions and accessibility
- Simplified approvals
- Improved communication
- Increase risk mitigation
- Effective contract tracking
- Built-in redlining
- Preapproved contract and clause templates
How to Configure Contract Management Workflows in SharePoint
Previously, configuring a workflow in SharePoint, required the downloading and installation of SharePoint Workflow Designer 2013. Due to many updates, SharePoint now allows you to build custom workflows within Power Automate. Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flow) makes creating workflows incredibly simple. When building a Power Automate workflow, you don’t have to worry about coding.
With triggers and actions, you enable and design a specified sequence of tasks to be completed within the workflow. Want to integrate some capabilities from platforms like Hubspot and Google? Power Automate gives you complete control to do so. In SharePoint Online, the Power Automate feature provides you will thousands of Microsoft workflow templates to choose from when designing a workflow. Rather than creating a workflow from scratch, you can simply select a template that fits your business needs.
When setting up a contract management workflow automation, you simply select a template and provide custom specifications for the unique workflow. Then, you can configure the route (often predesigned by the template itself) and enable specific email and notification triggers. Lastly, you will select specific people or parties responsible for certain action steps within the workflow. Workflows are easy, effective, and simplify contract management dramatically.
The Advantages of Workflows in Contract Management
- Offers a standardized and systematized sequence for various contract management needs and processes (approvals, notifications, etc.)
- Automates tasks, approvals, and hand-offs
- Creates efficiency in contract tracking
- Increased security and compliance management
- Audit trails that document actions with workflows
- Interactive user dashboards to gain insights on all contract lifecycles
Bottom line: Contract workflows create pathways for faster and more efficient contract management.
The results?
- Productivity-driven sales: increased efficiency means faster sales and more business opportunities
- Accurate agreements: build various legal agreements securely and precisely every time
- Better overall compliance: standardization of systems directly drives compliance on an upward trajectory, better protecting your business
- Increased access to key insights: collect and analyze several data points at any time
- Reduced turnaround times: onboarding and finalizing agreements is streamlined and expedited
- Improved risk mitigation and risk management: systematizing liability and handling of data minimizes risk and ensure company policies are followed
- Maximized value of your contract management: contract monitoring and analysis of key data equips with you full visibility of your systems so you can identify areas of strength and area for improvement
Contract Management is a Thorough, Time-Consuming, and Tedious Job – Workflows Can Help
Contracts demand a high level of attentiveness through every stage of their lifecycles. With contract management workflow automation, you can track and automate tasks without spending your time and resources directly on the document. In contract management, not only are you required to develop and archive contracts and various related legal agreements according to exact compliance standards and policies, but you also are required to send, monitor, track, and compile reports on the contracts.
In this way, many manual actions and tasks can stack up quickly within your business’s contract management. Tracking obligations and making notations of critical deadlines can be difficult when data is accumulated across various emails, Excel spreadsheets, filing cabinets, physical and digital documents, and on shared drives within an organization. Have a large organization? Or perhaps a moderately-sized one that works with a high volume of very complex documents? Then these issues are increased monumentally.
As a business grows, the volume of contracts directly increases. For your contract management team and associated departments (legal, sales, etc.) to maintain the demands of productive and accurate contract management, it’s necessary to implement contract workflow automation. This way, your company can be well equipped for the demands placed on your business, as well as feel confident in your ability to scale.
Workflows truly stand out for their ability to maximize and expedite the contract creation step, where you can develop contracts using preapproved templates within a workflow. Additionally, workflows boost collaboration, communication, and negotiation – ensuring all parties are on the same page with a centralized communication platform with editing and redlining capabilities. And lastly, workflow automation provides users with on demand access to various contract data, so you can make well-informed business decisions based on current and historical contract metrics and insights.
Conclusion
Contract management software with automated workflows can open up opportunities to save time and improve the quality of contract lifecycles with a user-friendly, collaborative software interface. With contract management workflows, your contract management software sends documents and legal agreements down a predesigned workflow pipeline that notifies specific parties of various actions to take and when to take them.
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 automated contract workflows. Take your contract management process to the next level by automating workflows so that every step of the contract lifecycle is as efficient, productive, and as collaboration friendly as possible. Ready to get started today? Reach out to us to learn more about our Dock 365 Contract Management System.
