How to Accelerate the Negotiation Phase of the Contract Lifecycle

The Three Keys to Improving Buy-side Contracting Velocity

For a global enterprise, negotiating a major new contract with a supplier can take months. The glacial speed of a manual contracting process can strain relationships and derail a supplier agreement and potentially sales.

Many procurement organizations that Icertis has worked with have discovered that increased visibility and improved agility improves contracting velocity and enables a stronger negotiating position.

For those organizations who are evaluating the speed of their current contract management system, there are three important points to consider.

Increasing Visibility Improves Contract Velocity 

For buy-side contracting, negotiations with suppliers are more effective when procurement has real-time access to all the relevant information about a supplier. When a statement of work, 3^rd party paper and related contracts are brought together in one cloud-based platform, procurement departments can optimize the entire source-to-contract process, ensuring compliance, minimizing risk, improving collaboration in addition to increasing savings.

One of our customers, a global pharmaceutical company, integrated the Icertis Contract Management (ICM) platform system into their existing IT infrastructure for financials and invoicing. This gave them a 360-degree view into sourcing agreements on a global scale.  Contracts were created four times faster, while ensuring consistent terms, saving the company millions of dollars per year.

Contract Velocity Begins with Contract Creation 

The ICM platform simplifies contract authoring by automatically suggesting the correct structure for each agreement, eliminating those clauses that do not apply. Using automation to enforce standardization reduces the risk of maverick contracts. Having compliant contracts that adhere to corporate guidelines means fewer delays later on in the contract lifecycle.

Contract Velocity is Closely Related to Ease of Use

The ICM platform allows users to author and edit contracts from within the applications they are already familiar with, such as Microsoft Word. Users can use Word to create a contract from a pre-approved template, change it offline and then upload it back into the system. Microsoft Word can also be used for redlining and comparing versions of a contract.

The ability to use familiar applications to create, edit and approve contracts, leads to high user adoption, and reduces the cost of training users. High adoption lays the foundation for a streamlined, efficient, rapid contracting process.

Can your organization benefit from the speed offered by an enterprise-wide contract management platform? To find the answer, assess your company’s contract management capabilities. Take our Contract Management Maturity Assessment to see where you stand.