Stages of Contract Lifecycle Management: #8 – Reporting & Data Analysis

In this contract lifecycle management series, we have discussed the first seven stages that occur within the lifecycle of a contract. These stages include the following:

Stage #1: Contract Request

Stage #2: Contract Authoring

Stage #3: Contract Approval

Stage #4: Contract Execution

Stage #5: Contract Storage

Stage #6: Records Management

Stage #7: Search and Retrieval

The next stage in contract lifecycle management is the reporting and data analysis stage. This stage is critical to making wise business decisions, gaining insights on digital contract performance, and strategizing the next steps for your contract management system.

Content-

• Stage #8: The Reporting and Data Analysis Stage
• Why Reporting and Data Analysis is Key to Successful Contract Management
• An Overview of Contract Data Analytics
• Data Analysis and Your Contract Management Dashboard
• The Advantages of A Comprehensive Contract Dashboard
• 10 Important Questions That Your Dashboard Can Answer
• Gain Valuable Insights Instantly
• Conclusion

Stage #8: The Reporting and Data Analysis Stage

This stage of contract lifecycle management focuses primarily on the effective retrieval of digital contract data so that accurate and in-depth contract reports can be developed. Data is additionally analyzed to aid in decision making, risk mitigation, and contract optimization. Contract management software systems provide custom reporting and data analytics capabilities so that you can gain valuable insights on each stage of every digital contract’s lifecycle.

Managing contracts post-execution is streamlined with advanced software features, allowing contract managers to save time when creating reports and analyzing contract data pertaining to several departments involved in their lifecycles (i.e., legal, sales, etc.). With detailed and user-friendly data analysis features always available, you can view the duration of digital contract lifecycles, savings, renewal statistics, sales metrics, and other data points pertaining to the effectiveness of your contract management processes.

Why Reporting and Data Analysis is Key to Successful Contract Management

Reporting is key to successful contract lifecycle management. Your contract management team needs to be able to access reports on demand based on various digital contract types. In addition, tracking the access history and version change history of your documents are very important. Generating reports based on compliance to contractual obligations is helpful to staying aware of how your contracts are performing. Consider items like contract changes, breaches of contract, and late payments—all of which can be tracked and flagged with detailed reporting features.

Gain information on how contract renewals are trending over time so you can adjust current protocols and improve. With reporting and data analytics, you can make business decisions based on hard data and quantitative contract performance metrics. In this way, you can better understand why you work with particular clients and vendors, as well as why you make certain decisions for your contract management processes. Your centralized SharePoint repository serves as the storehouse of infinite contract-related information – and using a data analysis tool will help you to better understand this information and make strategic decisions moving forward.

An Overview of Contract Data Analytics

One of the greatest benefits of using a contract data analytics tool is the awareness of potential gaps and areas of growth, allowing you to make informed changes and reduce unnecessary costs. By consistently analyzing digital contract data, you can pinpoint where production is lacking, where time is being mismanaged, and where compliance is substandard. We highly suggest making contract audits a standard and scheduled practice so you can ensure that your processes are compliant. Auditing your contracts also helps to reduce financial, contractual, and operational risks. Our contract management solution provides comprehensive audit trail capabilities so you can safeguard your contract management process.

Any contract manager and business owner would want to know the location, status, and performance of their digital contracts at all times. Manually monitoring and tracking contracts is a lengthy and disjointed process, but contract management software solves this problem. Contract management software can seamlessly track and organize your contract data into detailed reports so you can easily view contract progress and make decisive decisions. With accessible and user-friendly digital contract dashboards, analyzing data and viewing your reports in real-time is easy.

Data Analysis and Your Contract Management Dashboard

With your dashboard, you can analyze data and see exactly how to improve your business’s contract lifecycle management system. In this way, you are able to analyze and learn from previous experiences, and use that data to improve systems as you move forward. On your dashboard, you can accumulate contract data to be shared with your legal department.

Because contract lifecycle management is the combined effort of various departments such as operations, sales, procurement, etc., your dashboard will include pieces of data that aren’t necessarily the most relevant to your legal department. With your Dock 365 dashboard, you can collect digital contract data for your legal team that is most relevant to their contributions. Your customizable dashboard is a wonderful solution that can be tailored to fit your unique business needs.

The Advantages of A Comprehensive Contract Dashboard

A key advantage of a comprehensive contract dashboard is the ability to identify trends in your contract management procedures. You can gain a broad overview of each stage of every digital contract’s lifecycle. During the contract lifecycle, Dock collects data and measurements regarding your how individuals and teams are collaborating on each document. Furthermore, your contract management system is equipped with advanced search and custom filter functionalities that provide ease in locating data and contract terms and clauses. Generating charts, graphs, and reports is rapid and accurate with Dock.

When analyzing data and generating reports, it’s critical that you identify the key pieces of information that will help most with developing strategies to improve internal functions and operations. This can be done by configuring your dashboard appropriately. Your elaborate contract management dashboard is complete with all of the most important insights, like digital contract lifecycle duration, quantity of contracts, and other key metrics. With constant visibility over your company’s contracts, you can pinpoint where you can increase efficiency and improve risk management and compliance.

10 Important Questions That Your Dashboard Can Answer

1. Where are bottlenecks occurring within our current contract lifecycle management process?
2. What is the average time that it takes to finalize a contract?
3. In terms of contract negotiations, which type of contract is negotiated most often?
4. Which contract clauses are negotiated most often?
5. What is the status of actions to be taken by a counterparty?
6. Which contracts have an upcoming renewal date?
7. Which contracts have an upcoming expiry date?
8. Which contracts have performed the best in the last 6 months?
9. Which contract clauses have performed the best in the last 6 months?
10. Where are areas of risk exposure present?

Gain Valuable Insights Instantly

By analyzing your digital contract data, you can focus your efforts on the areas of need first and foremost, prioritizing certain tasks according to a comprehensive assessment of the performance of your contract lifecycle management system. In addition, having this holistic overview of your contracts can help you to drive strategic business decisions. With your dashboard, you will have the status of your contracts displayed according to if they are active, pending, or expiring. You can also enable automated reminders to notify you of incoming due dates so that the appropriate departments and individuals can take proactive actions. In this way, you can increase the efficiency of your negotiations and keep your teams on track.

Your dashboard serves as a place to derive the most accurate and up-to-date contract insights and knowledge. Easily extract contract metrics from the very beginning of contracts, all the way through their lifecycles to the very end, allowing you to analyze milestones and each action involved. Analyze data to optimize contract management to your business’s advantage so that make the most well-informed business decisions. Your dashboard with Dock is constantly available with clear information that will help you gain an understanding of your contract management processes, allowing you to learn how exactly you can improve your organization’s contract lifecycle management as you move forward.

Conclusion

The reporting and data analysis stage of contract lifecycle management is central to the long-term success and strategic management of your company’s contracting processes. Here at Dock, we can help you optimize this very stage of contract lifecycle management in a way that is suited to your company’s unique business needs and objectives.

The Dock 365 Contract Management System provides powerful and productive contract management, especially in the reporting and data analysis stage of a contract’s lifecycle. Dock works to streamline and simplify your contract management process for every individual and team involved so that work can be completed as productively and efficiently as possible.

Continue your exploration of Stages of Contract Lifecycle Management with Dock 365 - Contract Expiration or Renewal.

If you would like more information, we welcome you to schedule a free demo with us today.