Contract lifecycle management is an essential component to every organization. It’s critical to have systems in place that allow for a standardized approach to managing a hefty contract portfolio. A poor contract lifecycle management system could mean losing track of your contracts and mismanagement of a growing contract portfolio.
Content:-
- 8 Ways Reporting Helps Your Company’s Contract Lifecycle Management Process
- Learn From Your Failures
- Identify Emerging Patterns and Trends
- Plan Ahead for Risk
- Make Well-Informed Decisions
- Monitor KPIs and Improve Processes
- Reporting Helps You Share Data With Internal Stakeholders
- Reporting Helps Work Proactively Towards Upcoming Deadlines
- Reporting Helps You Gain A Bird’s Eye View of Your Whole Contract Portfolio
- Gain the Competitive Contract Management Advantage with Dock 365
However, managing contracts effectively takes more than simply planning for deadlines and organizing your agreements. A powerful, optimized contract lifecycle management process will leverage reporting features and performance monitoring capabilities provided by a dedicated contract lifecycle management (CLM) software solution. Reporting and overseeing the performance of your contracts helps you gain valuable insights on how to improve your current contracting processes and identify where areas of opportunity might exist.
Oftentimes, contract managers and legal departments choose to employ contract management software because of the advanced custom reporting features available in these solutions. Custom reporting can assist companies by providing them with a comprehensive understanding of all the details included in their agreements. These details outline where their contracting processes are thriving and where they need improvement, as well as what trends are most important to track as time progresses.
We’ll discuss why contract lifecycle management software reporting capabilities can significantly help your company gain control on a growing, complex contract portfolio. By analyzing and developing reports on your company’s contracts, you can create data-driven strategies for future contract lifecycle management success.
8 Ways Reporting Helps Your Company’s Contract Lifecycle Management Process
Reporting can support your company with all of the following:
1. Learn From Your Failures
The most common mistakes made when managing contracts include forgotten contract auto renewal and expiration dates, missed deadlines, violations of compliance standards, and mismanagement of funds. With effective, custom contract reporting, you can alleviate any of the pains associated with these very common issues. Taking corrective action is easy when you’re equipped with the data that shows how, when, and why certain problems occur. This can help you avoid the same mistakes moving forward. You can also analyze what contracts performed well so you can take steps to repeat the same process.
2. Identify Emerging Patterns and Trends
A custom reporting feature can help you identify any emerging patterns and trends in your contracts, allowing you to make the most of your data and plan ahead based for the future. One scenario where using contract trends can help is when making decisions regarding which contracts to renew and which to terminate. If a given contract’s renewal date is approaching, leverage your custom reporting features to see if similar contracts had performed well previously. If so, you can feel more confident in your choice to renew it.
3. Plan Ahead for Risk
Contract management reporting is phenomenal for risk mitigation. Reduce and manage potential risk by leveraging all the customized data provided by this feature, allowing you to make decisions pertaining to your organization’s risk mitigation and management strategy. Reporting can help you decide how to respond to unforeseen circumstances as well as help you take decisive, corrective action before a small mistake turns into something much bigger.
4. Make Well-Informed Decisions
Any company would only want to continue working with the most favorable contracts. Reporting features can help you decide which contracts are best to renew, and which ones should be terminated. Now that you can view the facts and important data on-demand, you can make critical business decisions with all the information at your fingertips. In this way, you’ll only renew the contracts that will help contribute to your business goals and objectives.
5. Monitor KPIs and Improve Processes
It’s important that you don’t lose sight of your contracts, that’s why consistently monitoring and setting KPIs is the key. To optimize your contract lifecycle management, you can set specific KPIs to oversee how each contract is performing. In addition, contract reporting features will help you improve your processes by collecting data that will help you both strategize and make the best choices for your system moving forward. This may lead to improvements like reduced contract lifecycles, faster negotiation and approval times, increased compliance, increased contract accuracy, and saved time, money, and resources.
6. Reporting Helps You Share Data With Internal Stakeholders
Communication and collaboration are critical components to effective contract management. When working across departments or with several teams in a large company, it can be a bit challenging. For legal, procurement, finance, sales, and other departments to work cohesively, contract management software offers numerous collaboration-minded features to make this possible. In addition, a dedicated CLM software centralizes all internal communications, that way everyone is kept on the same page in the same digital platform. To work against any information silos, reporting on your contracts can seriously help. You can share important contract metrics, data, trends, and more with anyone in your organization. Reporting is made remarkably easy with contract management software, and several custom options give you the ability to schedule and share contract reports with internal stakeholders. You can configure settings to have customized reports be distributed throughout your organization on a predetermined schedule. If you’d like to have monthly reports prepared for discussion, you can easily do so with this powerful capability.
7. Reporting Helps Work Proactively Towards Upcoming Deadlines
Missed deadlines and forgotten auto renewal and expiration dates can lead to some of the most detrimental repercussions to an organization. To ensure you never miss a key date or deadline again, we recommend leveraging the reporting feature of a contract management software solution so you can keep everyone in-the-loop. Ever wonder what the timeframe of an opt-out window is on a certain contract? Well, you can easily find those dates in your contract management software so you don’t have to worry about an auto renewal. By keeping tabs on all of your key deadlines, you can gain contract control and save money, rather than waste it on contracts that aren’t ideal. The reason why contract reporting can be so advantageous in terms of tracking your deadlines is because your reports contain every upcoming date in a single place. For example, you can run custom reports on all of your contracts to identify which ones expire in 30-, 60-, and 90-day intervals. And with automated reminders and alerts, you can keep everyone reminded of their responsibilities, obligations, and milestones for their contracts.
8. Reporting Helps You Gain A Bird’s Eye View of Your Whole Contract Portfolio
Reporting is important for knowing what is happening with your contracts at all times. Monitoring contract performance, location, status, and entire contract lifecycles is critical to understanding what next steps to take and what responsibilities might need to be shifted. Your contract management software’s custom reporting feature gives you the ability to standardize your reporting by automatically scheduling custom reports according to certain data tags. In this manner, you can run monthly and quarterly reports discussing items like opt-out windows, active contract performance, risky-clause management, required legal reviews, and vendor agreement performance. By generating custom reports on an automated schedule, you’ll ensure that your teams have access to all the data they need to make intelligent contract decisions.
Gain the Competitive Contract Management Advantage with Dock 365
The best contract lifecycle management (CLM) system can help your organization generate detailed, customized reports for contract management success. In addition, a CLM system can help your organization reduce risk, automate tasks, and centralize communications.
The Dock 365 Contract Management System offers a powerful and cost-efficient approach to contract lifecycle management using your Microsoft 365 and SharePoint tenant as the base for contract management. Dock’s easy-to-use, aesthetic, and customizable contract lifecycle management software provides unique features and integrations that boost collaboration, efficiency, and productivity. Upgrade your contract management system today with Dock.
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