Manual vs. Automated Enterprise Contract Management

Creating, reviewing, and approving a contract can be a slow process. Automating this process helps organizations accelerate negotiations, improve governance, and enable more efficient authoring. But the real benefits of an enterprise contract management platform come after the contract is created.

If contracts aren't carefully tracked across the entire enterprise for their full lifecycle, commitments, compliance requirements, and potential discounts can get overlooked. Missing these targets negatively impacts a company's revenue, compliance record, and relationships.

Before Automated Contract Management

Consider the example of Airtel, a multi-billion dollar telecommunications company. Until deploying the Icertis Contract Intelligence (ICI) platform, Airtel had no contract management system, no uniform contract templates, and no central storage location. Instead, the organization was manually producing hundreds of complex contracts in various languages. Without an automated enterprise contract management system in place, Airtel employees could not effectively track supplier service level agreements (SLAs). Monitoring SLAs in this way could impact Airtel’s operational performance and increase risk.

Managing contracts manually often results in additional negative consequences for organizations:

Creating contracts is time-consuming, and formats and terms aren’t standardized.
NDAs, RFPs, and other contract templates are spread among numerous desktops and drives.
Formerly "standard" templates quickly begin to lose consistency.
Sending draft contracts to reviewers via email is risky and often results in version control issues.
Determining when a contract has been executed and where the final version lives is difficult, leading to confusion, uncertainty, slower processes, and decreased revenue.
Finding and updating contracts is challenging, and commitments can be missed, resulting in noncompliance and increasing risk.

After Automated Contract Management

Implementing the ICI platform helped Airtel streamline its contract management operations in just a few months, empowering the company to:

Track and enforce contract SLAs.
Define SLA terms.
Capture SLA data to review status.
Standardize the company's library of clauses and templates.
Create a rules-driven selection process.
Manage 450 new contracts within six months.
Reduce contract cycle time.
Maintain contracts in a central repository accessible to the entire organization.
Identify SLAs at risk of going off track.

There are many advantages to transitioning from a manual to an automated enterprise contract management system. But why choose Icertis?

Icertis Platform Built for the Modern Enterprise

Icertis designed the ICI platform with the modern enterprise in mind. According to Sanjeev Prasad, CIO of Genpact, a multinational IT services company with $2 billion in annual revenue:

“Icertis Contract Management has helped us improve contract compliance by streamlining and automating the way we monitor and manage SLA and SOW commitments, cutting what was a two-week contract cycle by 50 to 60 percent,” he said. “Not only has this improved visibility into the process across all our customers—big and small—but it's also enabled us to get things done more quickly and increase our speed to market.”

Improving efficiency without sacrificing quality of work is vital to every organization. To learn more about how an enterprise contract management platform can accelerate contract velocity and move your business forward, contact us today. Or request a free demo to see Icertis Contract Intelligence in action.

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