Today we are releasing the third episode of Icertis’s new podcast series, “Contracts Over Coffee.” This series brings together the most influential voices in the Icertis Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) partner ecosystem to discuss all things related to contracting while enjoying a delicious coffee beverage.

In this episode, our Senior Director of Partner Marketing, Anne Baker, was joined by Marsha Hanus, a product management and solutions strategy executive at Wipro. Marsha has a passion for helping organizations solve business problems with technology, including contract management software.

Here are four highlights from Marsha:

1. Change Management Is Key for CLM Deployment

Anne:  What do you think is the biggest challenge with contracting today?

Marsha: When you look at the traditional contract process, there are multiple players involved in the negotiation and approval process and it requires a lot of meetings to bring a lot of stakeholders together. But with a contract management solution, you can automate that process and create workflows.

Ensuring that that process is maintained over time–and is executed effectively and properly–requires change management. It requires that the tools and the technology are properly introduced and people understand them so you can sustain the change, measure the progress, demonstrate the value when there are successes, communicate those successes, take corrective actions when corrective actions need to be taken, as well as leverage metrics to show the data.

2. Poor Contract Management Is Costing Companies Millions

Anne: What do you think people would be surprised to know about contracting?

Marsha: I think people would be surprised to learn that poor contracting methods can cost an organization up to 9 percent of their revenue. And this was a number cited by the International Association of Contracts and Commercial Management (IACCM). Nine percent of revenue is a lot of revenue. … For a billion-dollar company, 9 percent of revenue is $90 million. $90 million is a lot of money. If you look at the cost of implementing CLM, it’s a very trivial cost compared to the amount of revenue that can ultimately be saved by implementing a CLM solution.

3. AI Is Delivering Measurable Results in CLM Deployments

Anne: Where do you think contracting is going in the future? What’s next?

Marsha: Wipro and Icertis have partnered together, leveraging Wipro’s home solution and Icertis’ AI technologies, to provide legacy contract migration and leverage cognitive services on open service technologies to automate the understanding of lengthy complex legal contracts. We’ve seen, on average, a 40% increase in productivity in the medium to long term, and by leveraging AI we’ve seen upwards of a 25% reduction in errors in the data extraction from complex contracts.

4. Our Perseverance Is Inspiring

Anne: What gets you out of bed in the morning?

Marsha: The world isn’t simple. Nothing in the world is easy either. Everybody has a story about how they got to where they are today. And everybody runs into things that knock you down and drive you backwards. And it’s when people decide they won’t let that stop them, and they pick themselves back up and move forward to try to achieve their goals and dreams, that’s really inspiring.