Contract lifecycle management (CLM) is a relatively new software category that is experiencing explosive growth. If you’re not familiar with CLM, don’t worry—you’re not alone. By accessing this introductory guide, you are joining a groundswell of interest around this game-changing technology: Gartner reports in its 2021 Critical Capabilities Report for CLM that client inquiries around CLM rose 40% in 2020 as contracts emerged as critical components in organizations’ crisis response plans.
Why contracts? As we illustrate below, contracts touch every part of an organization’s value chain. From demand planning to compliance; from pricing to shipping and routing; from channel management to profitability—these strategic documents define what you buy, what you sell, and how you run.
By digitizing contracts on a single, organization-wide platform, companies can gain full visibility into every contract in their organization. This empowers even the biggest operations to quickly understand and leverage all their commercial relationships—from seeing how many open contracts they have with a particular supplier, to actively mitigating risk, to identifying opportunities for better commercial performance via rebates, service bundling, and other contractual entitlements. Indeed, if contracts touch every aspect of a business, CLM drives speed, performance, and compliance into those systems and processes.