Effectively managing contract renewals is essential for healthy supply chain performance. If a contract expires without notice, negative consequences may soon follow. Lapsed contracts can leave procurement teams scrambling to find new suppliers in order to meet customer demands. While timely contract renewals are critical for maintaining efficiency, organizations often struggle to manage the renewal process. Here’s why:
The Challenge of Managing Renewals
Traditional, manual contract management processes don’t provide sufficient visibility into where a contract stands. Tracking expiry and renewal dates across thousands of contracts is no simple task, especially in the absence of a centralized database. Manual contract management also leaves room for error. Contracts can easily expire without notice if a renewal reminder isn’t properly entered into a calendar or spreadsheet.
How Contract Management Software Can Help
Fortunately, there’s a better way to track and manage contract renewals. An enterprise contract management platform serves as a central repository for contracts, providing increased visibility and allowing procurement teams to establish a simple and efficient renewal process. It also lets organizations:
- Track expiration dates and send reminders well in advance, giving procurement teams ample time to review the contract’s performance and develop a renewal strategy.
- Link contracts with their financial and performance metrics in a smart, contextual interface, making it easier to evaluate whether a contract is delivering its intended value.
- Access a single source of truth on all an enterprise’s contracts. This makes it easier to see if a contract is in line with standards in terms of pricing, requirements and compliance. Approved template libraries, drafting wizards and a modern, intuitive interface make creating and modifying contracts fast and easy, accelerating the contract renewal lifecycle.
- Track approvals, so it’s always clear where the contract is. This helps to avoid bottlenecks and ensure that contracts don’t expire because they were forgotten in someone’s inbox.
- Leverage automation to improve standardization and compliance, replacing hours of manual tracking, research and follow up. The procurement team gains time to focus on increasing revenue, managing existing contracts and maximizing value for the company.
The Icertis Contract Management platform maximizes these advantages by allowing users to configure their own dashboards to see critical data on cycle times, deviations, expiries, renewal dates and other key metrics – all in real time.
Icertis, the leading provider of enterprise contract management in the cloud, solves the hardest contract management problems on the easiest to use platform. Icertis helps companies transform their commercial foundation ensuring compliance, improving governance, mitigating risk and enhancing user productivity, thereby improving the bottom line. The Icertis Contract Management (ICM) platform is used by 1+ million users at companies like 3M, Abbvie, Cognizant, Daimler, and Microsoft, to manage 3.5+ million contracts in 40+ languages across 90+ countries. With its intelligent workflow and built-in analytics, ICM provides ongoing contractual insights and best-of-breed contract management. For more information, visit www.icertis.com.
