Every business has contracts, and the management of these is a critical piece of infrastructure that can present many challenges. Some companies will overlook it, which results in compliance problems, delays, inefficiencies, and financial losses.
Contract lifecycle management software (CLM) is designed to mitigate these issues by automating the end-to end contract lifecycle, saving time and money, whilst providing enhanced visibility into contracts. To simplify contract lifecycle management, we recommend that you consider these 5 most common benefits.
What is Contract Lifecycle Management?
Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) is the systematic and efficient management of contracts from requests to expiry. It seamlessly oversees the entire contract journey, encompassing request, creation, drafting, negotiation, execution, auditing, and the renewal or expiration phase.
Contract lifecycle management tools aim to simplify and mechanise these processes, all while establishing structured workflows for every step of the contract lifecycle. In the past, businesses often attempted to manage this complex process manually, but with limited success.
In the modern landscape, AI-powered CLM solutions offer organisations a well-organised framework for contract management. Digital contract management enhances operational efficiency, minimizes risks, and ensures adherence to legal and regulatory requirements.
Why is Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) Important?
Contracts touch every corner of business from sales to finance, marketing and of course, legal. Research states that 60 – 80% of B2B transactions are underwritten by some form of agreement! They establish deliverables, account for every penny that enters and leaves the business and protects you from risk.
In today's fast-paced, highly regulated business environment, effective CLM is not merely advantageous; it's essential for achieving operational excellence, managing risks, and ensuring that contracts are assets rather than liabilities. Organisations that invest in CLM gain a competitive edge by unlocking the full potential of their contractual relationships.
7 Benefits of Using Contract Lifecycle Management
Managing contracts is an essential part of the day-to-day running of a business, and it naturally comes with a set of unique challenges. This has resulted in many companies overlooking the process, resulting in compliance issues, delays, inefficiencies and financial losses. Implementing a contract lifecycle management tool can bring many business-wide benefits, but to simplify them, we’ve provided the top 5.
Self-serve
CLM tools enable anyone from the business to generate watertight contracts in a few clicks. No more waiting for legal to populate the template and send it across. CLM tools automate low-value contract creation such as NDAs, MSA and more from a library or preapproved and designed legal templates. Legal teams are no longer siloed with low-value work, giving them valuable hours back in the day.
In January 2023, Thought Machine was looking to reduce the administrative burden on the legal team of the lower-value agreements to allow them to focus on more strategic work. By utilising
Summize’s Slack integration to create a legal front door, they allowed the wider business to self-serve on contract creation, automating the process and removing the burden off legal.
"With Summize in place and our Slack integration for self-service contract creation, NDAs and trial agreements are being signed faster, which was a key objective for Thought Machine. Version control is easier, stakeholders are pleased with the new template/process, and the legal team has more time to spend on the more strategic work".
Kate Armstrong, Senior Legal Counsel / Head of Legal Design and Operations at Though Machine.
Since the launch, they have generated over 300 NDAs in less than 6 months.
You can read the full customer story here.Intelligent Analytics
With customisable dashboards and reports, contract lifecycle management tools unlock data that is usually hidden away, turning contracts into enablers. These insights provide business leaders with comprehensive analytics that enable them to enhance their decision-making process, as well as refinements to processes that are causing bottlenecks across the contract lifecycle.
Faster and improved revenue generation
CLM tools allow you to enhance your business’ tracking capabilities throughout the contract lifecycle and improve and accelerate your contract negotiation cycles – eliminating any delays and bottlenecks in the sales process and get to revenue faster.
Reduced risk
Most CLM vendors today offer review features that allow stakeholders to identify and minimise contract risk, as well as offering audit trails for compliance monitoring. Smarter and more accurate business decision-making with instant summaries and key date reminders allows legal teams to seamlessly identify areas that should be renegotiated or flagged to save your business from costly delays and irrelevant partnerships.
Improved Efficiency
Put repetitive work on autopilot and accelerate contract cycles such as reviews, saving time and money on already stretched resource. Automated workflows do the hard work, allowing legal teams to focus on strategic work rather than being inundated with low-value tasks such as contract reviews. Automatic summaries and areas of concern flagged mean legal teams can review more contracts, faster.
Boon Edam wanted to reduce the time spent reviewing contracts to free up legal resource. By implementing Summize, they accelerated their review process with useful summaries powered by AI technology directly in Word, reducing their time spent reviewing contracts each day by 43%.
Read the full customer story here. Dynamic Repository
Legal teams would often store contracts all over the place, in filing cabinets, the cloud and more! A CLM provides businesses with a central repository to store all of their contracts in one place. No more wasted hours looking for or through agreements, the simplified search experience makes finding your contracts quick and easy.
Purple partnered with Summize to create a clever and manageable contract repository. The intelligent automation of Summize’s CLM solution provides instant summaries and actionable tasks, as well as flagging immediate risks across Purple’s contracts, this has saved the legal team 50% of the time on their contract management.
Read the full customer story here. Improved Compliance
Contract lifecycle management tools offer a central space for contract requests, giving business users access to the most recent approved templates and playbooks. Legal teams can rest easy knowing that guardrails on standard positions and approvals ensure that every contract is fully legal and company compliant.
How CLM Software Can Drive Results for Your Business
Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) software is a transformative tool that can yield significant benefits for your business. With technology advances in today’s digital-first world, CLM has become a critical component for businesses looking to reduce costs, increase efficiency and gain a competitive advantage over their counterparts.
By looking for the benefits outlined above, you can streamline your contract lifecycle management process and avoid some common CLM pitfalls, ensuring the maximum ROI.
Summize is a contract lifecycle management solution that exists to help everyone understand each other better. By embedding contract workflows into Teams, Slack and Word to create a familiar experience to maximise adoption, prioritise usability and speed up the end-to-end contract lifecycle.
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