A report from The International Association for Contract and Commercial Management revealed a startling statistic: sell-side contracts consume more than 76% of contracting resources. For half of these contracts, the cycle time from bid to execution can take 21 weeks or longer.
When a global organization devotes that many resources to managing sell-side contracts, it indicates a clear need for a more efficient process. To unlock the full value in your sell-side contracts, your contract management platform should provide you with the following capabilities.
Templates and Clauses Library
It's challenging to draft a contract from scratch. With a database of approved clauses at your fingertips, creating a contract that adheres to corporate standards is easy and accurate. An intelligent rules engine can assemble the contract from these templates, as well as orchestrate the approval process – without sacrificing contract velocity.
Renewal Management
Renewing an expired contract requires renegotiation and redrafting. If you know when each contract will expire, you can get a jump on the renewal process. If negotiations are necessary, they are often easier to work through when you do not have the contract expiration date knocking on your door.
Commercial Compliance
Managing compliance across global sales teams and geographies is challenging. Achieving the full potential of negotiated contracts requires better enforcement of commercial terms. The Icertis platform captures the commercial terms of products and services, prices, discounts, rebates and incentives in a structured form, integrates that data with enterprise systems and helps enforce terms. Workflows allow supporting legal teams to identify and manage risk throughout the contract lifecycle with proactive insights on compliance.
Risk Management
Risk management begins at the contract creation phase, long before the agreement is signed. Manually tracking commitments, expiries, deviations and other obligations can take an enormous number of resources. The Icertis Contract Intelligence (ICI) platform has user-configurable risk assessment models to address this issue.
Small errors or oversights in the early stages of a contract's lifecycle can have profound effects downstream. A configurable risk model helps track risks across different categories, such as financial, contractual, performance and third party. External data from sources such as D&B and Thomson Reuters help determine risk scores, ensure proactive risk monitoring and increase visibility for stakeholders.
And by exchanging data with your existing CRM, pricing and CPQ systems, you'll be able to have a comprehensive view of all the risks associated with a contract.
To learn more about how contract intelligence software can help you automate your contract lifecycle workflow and manage risk, schedule a free demo.
