Significantly drive compliance and adherence to regulatory requirements via our Contracts Management Solution. Drive better productivity across your organization including the contracts team.
CONTRACTS MANAGEMENT
Enterprises or Government agencies invest in Enterprise applications to standardize their core business processes (Eg. ERP, CRM, SRM, SCM). However, several processes are in fact triggered by or generate unstructured information such as email, technical documentations, contracts, photos, résumés, product specifications, and much more. Close to 80% of enterprise information is in unstructured format and contracts are no exception. Only some key data about the contract is entered into ERP or other transaction processing systems while the contract itself, containing all the clauses, terms and conditions is in document format and needs to be managed meticulously. Furthermore, there is a lot of important internal and external correspondence around contracts which needs to be retained for reference and audit purposes. Contracts Management applications built on Enterprise Content Management principals and core capabilities offer numerous features to help users manage contracts across their lifecycle – to create, collaborate on, review, approve, store, renew, share, archive and retain these contract documents.
CONTRACTS MANAGEMENT - CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES
In many enterprises, the worlds of structured business processes and unstructured content exist in isolation from one another. This leads to business users spending inordinate amounts of time searching for misplaced content or recreating it entirely. Additionally, this has an impact in the form of slower decision making leading to ultimately higher costs or loss of revenues. Worse still, data is often lost, putting the business at risk. The problem is far more critical when important legal and contractual documents are lost. Mismanaged contracts also often fall into the wrong hands and can be misused or lead to fundamental organizational issues. Furthermore the process of reviewing, approving and periodically renewing contracts is very cumbersome when done manually leading to major organizational risks related to the quality and correctness of contractual agreements.
CONTRACTS MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS ADDRESSING BUSINESS NEEDS
Manage the lifecycle of contracts
Integrating content to transaction data
Contracts Management should not exist in isolation as this does not allow contractual content to be seen in the context of business processes managed in ERP and other enterprise apps. Our offerings bridge this gap between Contracts Management and other enterprise applications, the gap between contract documents and contract data, providing a deep and seamless integration between the two for unified information and user experience.
Integrating contracts into end user desktops
Our solutions for Contracts Management are integrated into end user tools typically used to draft, review and collaborate on contracts. Users can find, consume, edit or create content from within Microsoft Office applications and email clients such as Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes. Users can also view contracts managed by our Contracts Management solution from within Windows Explorer on their desktop, without having to store content locally.
Granular access controls
Provide access to contract documents on ‘need to know basis’ with multi-level granular access control mechanisms, ensuring only the right people at the right time have access to the right contract documents.
Contract collaboration and workflows
Users can collaborate on contract documents and provide comments and real-time feedback. Workflows can be triggered for contract review and approvals. Our offering also comes with web-forms capabilities for users to enter data and submit along with contract documents to assign metadata or trigger review and approval workflows. These workflows can also triggered based on events or rules such as ‘current date is within 6 months of contract expiry date’, thus ensuring that contract renewals are never missed.
Managing contracts as enterprise records
Contract documents and associated metadata can be declared and treated as records within the system to ensure that they are retained for a legally stipulated period of time and cannot be deleted even by users who have the necessary permissions. Such records can also be brought under the fold of legal holds to ensure that they are retained for the duration of a legal case and can be pulled up or ‘discovered’ during litigation proceedings. Thus enterprise contracts are governed appropriately and legal risks of the organization are mitigated.
THE AVAALI ADVANTAGES
Avaali helps organizations significantly improve productivity and meet regulatory requirements by ensuring full visibility into both data and content related elements of a business process. Our consultants have a deep understanding of best practices as a result of implementing Enterprise Content Management solutions, with integration to ERP and other applications, for several global accounts. Avaali provides advisory services, implementation and support services to support the unique business process requirements of complex, global enterprises.