Contract Insights

With new advancements and options for effective contract management continually evolving, we’ve detailed five essential contract management tools contract managers must empower themselves with to navigate the ever-changing landscape of contract management best practices going forward.

Contracts are legally binding agreements that define and govern the exchange of goods or services. A contract’s journey – from creation to fulfillment and completion – is complex and leaves room for errors and oversights. As such, a process has been generally agreed upon for the handling of contracts. This process is referred to as contract management.

But what is contract management, and how can it be approached? Here’s what you need to know.

2021 has arrived, and with it comes new innovations to your contract management software processes.  Keeping this in mind, we have outlined six critical contract management tools that your organization should equip itself with to stay ahead of future-minded contract management best practices in 2021 and beyond.

Creating value in an ever-expanding industry-agnostic competitive landscape requires that organizations improve performance, reduce spending, and make data-driven decisions.   With the preponderance of spending locked into contracts, leading organizations must find a way to harness their complexity to create value and the following four strategies can help.

The IT Industry is facing unprecedented challenges with digital transformation.  Whether you’re an IT service provider, CIO, CTO, or work in a corporate IT department, the future state of your organization is weighing heavily on your team.  To future-proof and take control in the face of stringent compliance requirements, security threats, and privacy and data breaches, IT professionals must be able to respond effectively to organizational change, technological advances, cybersecurity demands, and behavioral, legal, and regulatory compliance requirements.

Virtually every organization in every industry has contracts to manage.  More than ever, there are increasing opportunities to drive value with the contract management process by improving communication, negotiation, conflict resolution, leadership, and technical capabilities with the right contract management tools.  Each contract manager’s challenge is to get buy-in on contract process improvement initiatives.

How many steps should be in a contract workflow? 

The correct answer is: It’s dependent on your organization’s needs. 

There is no set number of tasks for a “perfect workflow”.  You must determine what steps are necessary and in what order they should be executed, establishing the best workflow for your organization to achieve CLM (contract lifecycle management) success.

New Year, New Strategy

As we enter a new year, we expect changes in software that will affect how we do business.  It’s important to understand how to effectively adjust business processes to succeed, but in this new contract era, predictions indicate we will focus on how we can apply digital transformation to develop better outcomes.  With the amount of technology that’s rapidly transforming the contract management industry, contract and procurement professionals should understand how to respond to achieve better results.