Why Your Enterprise needs a ‘Single Source of Truth'
Contracts are the central nervous system of your enterprise, communicating a vast amount of information that defines the scope of your operations. The importance of contracts can’t be overstated: in fact, more than 80% of a company’s transactions are tied to contracts.
In a perfect world, your contract portfolio provides stakeholders with a single source of truth—enterprise-wide insight that helps your business maximize value and minimize risk. The reality is that it has become exceedingly difficult to aggregate data, or obtain any meaningful insight using traditional, siloed data management systems.
Take control of the entire contract lifecycle
A powerful, cloud-based contract management solution is the best way to leverage available technology to capture all your enterprise contract data and create a single source of truth for your organization. With the right CLM platform, you have enterprise-wide visibility and insight, and stakeholders can easily access the information they need and collaborate in real time.
Icertis Contract Management (ICM) is a robust and secure platform that provides a single source of truth for your contract portfolio by providing transparency and real-time insights at every stage of the contract lifecycle. ICM eliminates traditional bottlenecks by providing an automated, standardized process. This standardization also reduces the need for legal to be involved with every contract. Your contracts become dynamic assets that can deliver significant competitive advantage as you use performance metrics to drive more revenue from existing and renewing contracts.
How does CLM provide a single source of truth during the contract lifecycle?
Drafting: The ability to leverage standard language saves time and limits the need for attorney review. Any changes are tracked; you can see the time and the individual who made changes. Because the platform is easy to use, it is more readily adopted by end users, helping reduce the problems associated with ad hoc processes.
Negotiation: Using a standard database of approved terms and conditions and rules reduces the complexity involved in negotiations. In addition, side-by-side comparisons with previous contracts are now possible.
Approval: It will no longer be a mystery where a particular contract is in the approval process, as the system precisely tracks the progression. With electronic signature functionality, actual sign-off is quick and easy.
Compliance: Real-time audits make it easier to identify non-compliance, and visibility of contract terms helps to minimize risk. Maverick spend is less likely because information is visible, so people do not create ad hoc contracts that may be out of compliance with organizational objectives.
Management and administration: With a central repository for all contracts, it becomes possible to easily track contract-related information throughout the enterprise—terms, commitments, approved clauses, etc. Advance notifications for impending milestones—including expiration and renewal dates, and price adjustments—save time and money.
Reporting: ICM can produce on-demand reports to audit for non-compliance, create performance assessments and analyze other contract data in real time, making it less onerous to manage risk and forecast revenue.
Renewal: Because alerts can be set, renegotiation is possible before the actual end date, and contracts that are no longer wanted can be proactively flagged and allowed to expire.
With so much relying on your contracts, your enterprise can’t afford to have competing versions of ‘the truth.’
To exercise complete control over the entire contract lifecycle, you need a powerful, cloud-based contract management platform to capture all your enterprise contract data and create a single source of truth for your organization.
In our next blog, we’ll explore how having a CLM solution delivers benefits to both the buy and sell sides, and will share some real-world results that can be achieved with Contract Lifecycle Management.