What are Common Bottlenecks in Contract Lifecycle Management?
Dock 365 offers all the enterprise contract management tools
Contract lifecycle management is complex. It calls for legal expertise, countless administrative tasks, and collaboration from across the board. Contractual agreements can also cost businesses time and money rather than creating new opportunities if they are not careful. They need improved and faster processes to churn out umpteen numbers of sales agreements, vendor contracts, NDAs, employment contracts, MSAs, and so on.
Then it’s no wonder businesses of all sizes are transforming to digital contracts to keep up with the competitive market. Today, all kinds of enterprise contract management tools are available to expedite each step of the contracting process. Depending on their unique needs and industry, companies can pick and choose their cocktail for an efficient and accurate contract lifecycle.
Relying on shared folders, paper documents, or spreadsheets to create and manage business agreements can be bothersome, especially when accuracy and timeliness are prudent. While every organization is unique, from drafting to signing to monitoring milestones, the challenges are the same across industries, locations, and contract types.
One of the major challenges of managing countless business agreements, especially when using traditional methods, is the lack of accessibility. Executed contracts lay waiting across file cabinets, multiple platforms, or drives. More than often, there’s no structure or efficient system in place for their storage. Naturally, organizations have a hard time finding relevant information or documents during times of need.
There is no easy way to get to the contracts for reviews, renewals, or terminations. Apart from the organizational productivity taking a hit, that is a lot of valuable time spent sifting through countless cabinets. And without a single platform storage, it’s difficult for the procurement, sales, and finance team to collaborate on contract lifecycle management.
Given the magnitude of contractual agreements in daily business operations, there’s no room for errors or lapses in judgment. Whether it’s sales or vendor contracts, organizations must stay on top of it throughout the relationship to avoid legal, operational, or financial repercussions. But with the decentralized storage and manual tracking processes, legal teams are bound to miss out on some significant dates or conditions.
For businesses, sifting through countless legal agreements to find and keep track of key clauses is a time-consuming hassle. Consequently, establishing compliance with obligations, regulations, and industrial standards becomes more demanding. As a result, prominent deadlines or milestones fall through the cracks.
All the parties involved in a contractual agreement agreeing to a set of terms and conditions can take a long time. And it is further delayed when organizations resort to emails or telephone calls to negotiate business contracts. With a lack of version history and real-time collaboration, ensuring all the stakeholders are on the same page regarding the legal agreement is next to impossible. As a result, the negotiation process takes longer and has a higher scope of error and inaccuracies.
Similarly, when contract signing happens over emails or wet signatures, it's drawn out unnecessarily. It puts a damper on the user experience and makes it much harder to onboard customers or vendors. When you have multiple documents or stakeholders, the traditional signing methods are not fit for the job.
Inefficiency in any phase of the contract lifecycle can lengthen the time-to-contract process. It takes time and effort to draft legal agreements from scratch each time. Moreover, unstandardized language or incompetent content can hinder the progression of the contract through the negotiation and approval process.
Contract lifecycle management would be chaotic without a set system or workflow to carry out the process. And the organizations won’t be able to monitor the lifecycle to identify and mitigate issues at each phase. It can also take a long time to manually execute documents by having the recipient sign them, scan them, and email them.
Contract management software provides various features to streamline and automate the contract lifecycle. These contract lifecycle management tools help organizations get past the numerous roadblocks that traditional methods create. While the specificities may vary depending on the software provider, here are some of the most sought-after tools in 2024:
When looking for contract lifecycle management solutions, storage may not be at the top of your list, but it is unquestionably necessary. Contract repository software helps organizations manage and organize their contracts in centralized cloud-based storage. This single source of truth allows users to sort and retrieve legal documents and related information with little effort and time during contract management.
Contract Drafting Software
Authoring competent and beneficial documents in no time is critical for businesses to convince vendors and customers. That is why organizations prefer to have contract drafting software at hand rather than starting from nothing each time. The software helps to compile the contract content, insert relevant clauses, and details, and generate a complete contract document. Here are some key features contract drafting software has to offer:
When multiple parties have a stake in the business agreement, it’s hard to keep track of all their input and modifications. Contract redlining software tools help in the collaborative editing and reviewing of contractual agreements during the negotiation. It enables multiple parties to make changes, track revisions, and negotiate contract terms efficiently.
Providing organizations with a respite from monitoring every activity within every stage of the contract lifecycle is automation. Contract management workflows automate the repetitive tasks involved in managing contractual agreements. It ensures the document gets to the right person at the right place without manual intervention.
E-signature platforms enable electronic contract signing and eliminate the need for physical signatures. This contract management tool helps organizations execute business agreements remotely and accelerate the contract lifecycle.
As contract volumes increase, organizations require advanced enterprise contract management tools to monitor contractual agreements throughout the lifecycle. Contract tracking software provides visibility into contract details, key dates, milestones, and obligations, allowing users to stay on top of contract-related tasks and deadlines.
Manual contracting procedures are inherently risky and make it hard to keep track of contracts and business relationships throughout their lifecycle. There’s no easy way to maintain version control or ensure compliance with industry and governmental standards. Additionally, drafting, negotiating, and approving a legal agreement takes a long time. Fortunately, enterprise contract management tools improve productivity and reduce manual effort throughout the contract lifecycle.
Or make it a bit easier by adopting Dock 365 contract management software with all these benefits. Our centralized platform, built on the Microsoft 365 environment, has diverse features to simplify every contract lifecycle management task.
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