As IT vendors and service providers brace for economic headwinds, leaders must do more than batten down the hatches. They need insights and automation that empower them to navigate the choppy waters ahead.
With the highest labor rates in 40 years, IT and professional services companies face labor costs far in excess of services costs negotiated last year. While improving, ongoing supply chain challenges mean businesses must shift on a dime. Meanwhile, the non-stop increase in the speed of business demands rapid, well-informed decisions to remain competitive.
As the adage goes: you can’t direct the wind, but you can adjust your sails.
Making intelligent, informed adjustments requires information. Contracts provide a wealth of information that can’t be found anywhere else in the organization. When digitized and turned into structured, searchable data, these critical documents can reveal paths to reduced leakage, track commitments, better cash management, necessary price adjustments, compliance, and more — everything required to right the business in a perfect storm of inflation, supply chain struggles, cost cutting, and recessionary fears. Client demands lead to revenue pressure forcing service companies to find ways to justify the charges or optimize further. Consulting and IT companies already have this data trapped in their existing contracts. Icertis Contract Intelligence (ICI), the category-defining contract intelligence platform, unlocks it, organizes it, and integrates it to help automate business processes, creating top and bottom-line impact.
ICI for Consulting & IT Services
Given the highly complex nature of IT and consulting relationships, maximizing contract value requires industry-specific solutions. That is why Icertis is committed to providing for the industry a contract intelligence solution pre-configured to meet its unique needs.
Icertis draws on our extensive experience working with the leading IT and consulting companies in the world, including four of the top five Global Systems Integrators (the fifth GSI can’t be, as they’re our auditors.)
There are several reasons for this. Let’s take a quick look at what makes Icertis Contract Intelligence ideal for consulting and IT organizations:
Superior AI
AI is an integral part of Icertis Contract Intelligence. Its purpose-built AI capabilities digitize contracts using OCR (optical character recognition), mine them with NLP (natural language processing), and analyze patterns thanks to machine learning. Our AI has been trained on millions of contracts managed on the platform, providing it with an unparalleled quantity, quality, and variety of data.
Icertis AI allows companies to quickly digitize legacy and third-party contracts, parsing, tagging, and unifying contract data. After contracts are signed; our AI ensures their true intent is captured and realized. How? By discovering the intent, i.e., all the commitments linked in the contracts, assigning them to owners for fulfillment, and tracking and monitoring them to completion. AI-assisted obligation discovery and fulfillment tracking reporting provide visibility into compliance and clarity around risk exposure.
Deep integrations
For data to be valuable, it must be connected to the organization’s existing systems of record and solutions. ICI has out-of-the-box integration with critical software systems such as Salesforce, E-Sign, SAP Ariba, SAP Fieldglass, SAP S/4HANA, and Microsoft Dynamics 365. Its native integrations with Microsoft Word, Outlook, and Teams create a seamless experience and workflow.
With more than 160 open API endpoints, ICI supports integration with all the systems and tools used across business processes.
With more than 160 open API endpoints, ICI supports integration with all the systems and tools used across business processes, from proposal management to sourcing to supplier relationship management and more, connecting contract data with the functions it powers to accelerate enterprise-level digital transformation.
Its tight integration with the SAP ecosystem covers the many activities of the organization's source to pay and quote to cash. ICI is the only contract intelligence contract lifecycle management solution premium certified by SAP.
Collaborative capabilities
ICI customers span the globe in more than 90+ countries, and so do their operations. They benefit greatly from the platform’s UX support for more than 25 languages, custom-defined contract language, and multicurrency support to collaborate internally and externally. Meanwhile, ICI’s Collaboration Portal ensures the organization’s external clients, suppliers, and vendors have access to contractual data, track obligations, and review compliance metrics. This puts everyone on the same page so they can work in tandem to create value.
Extensive automation
ICI automates the end-to-end contract process—from the drafting of a contract to the auto-creation of handover documents capturing account and deal insights for a smooth transition from sales to delivery teams which are often different so that no gaps occur.
Customer-specific terms (e.g., travel policy, rate card, etc.) can be auto-inserted into documents during contract creation. While during the lifecycle of the contract, pre-configured rules — tailored to the business and category — mitigate risk by automatically detecting anomalies or data artifacts.
Highly configurable
With little to no code required, the ICI platform is configurable, scalable, and extensible, ideally suited for large, complex, globally matrixed services organizations. Services organizations can start with the ICI for Consulting & IT Services pre-configured vertical solution and extend it to fit their specific contracting, workflow, and compliance needs.
Dynamic clause assembly driven by business rules can be tailored to specific customer needs, and configurable workflows determine the right level of approvals based on contract language deviation. Tailored role-based experiences enable granular access control helping minimize risk and compliance with governance and security requirements.
Obligation discovery
Contracts are collections of obligations between the business and third parties. One of the linchpins of ICI is its discovery and management capabilities.
ICI’s Obligation Management application uniquely follows the contract throughout its term from discovery, tracking, and fulfillment to risk mitigation and, ultimately, reporting and analytics. This results in end-to-end obligation management. Hugely essential, and crucial for IT and consulting services, obligations flow seamlessly down to subcontractors, and performance against them is effectively tracked through the lifecycle of the relationship.
Advanced analytics
By using ICI to drive analytics, leaders from the legal team and other internal stakeholders can understand how contracts are performing based on every relationship — clients, subcontractors, partners, and suppliers. With clear visibility into what was negotiated and what obligations are being met, IT and consulting services companies can deliver much higher levels of satisfaction and plug any sell-side revenue leakage.
Armed with a 360-degree view of a client’s compliance, revenue risk, and improvement opportunities, IT and consulting services can better identify incremental savings, improve organizational efficiency, find new revenue opportunities, ensure compliance, manage risk, and make smarter, better, data-driven decisions.
See how these AI-first applications work together on a single platform:
In good times and bad, the insights from ICI act as a North Star, pointing the company to smoother, more lucrative waters.
Check it out!
Are you excited to see how contract intelligence can transform your business and lead to more significant revenue, efficiency, and savings? Request a free demo to see ICI contract intelligence in action!
