The value of automated contract management software is obvious to many procurement and contract management professionals. Managing contracts manually can leave your team stuck in a cycle of ineffective and inefficient day-to-day processes, instead of allowing them to think and act strategically and make positive changes within your organisation.
Adopting an automated contract management system is an incredible opportunity to streamline your processes and improve the transparency of your operations, digitally transforming your organisation and allowing you to realise benefits in as little as four weeks.
If you’re looking to experience the benefits that contract management software can bring to your business, then you may need to present a highly evidence-based, data-backed and strategic recommendation to align management with your vision.
It’s important to take stock of where your organisation is currently sitting in its procurement and contract management maturity evolution, so you can properly analyse whether you’re ready to digitally transform with an automated contract management system. With this in mind, let’s take a look at some key factors for gauging whether your business is ready for CMS adoption.
How do you create requests?
In the present moment, how do your team members, stakeholders and suppliers request new contracts? Is there a standardised, permission-based process that’s comprehensive, easy to use, and simple to track and improve upon?
How do you manage contract authoring?
Do you have standard templates that allow you to draft and edit contracts quickly? An automated contract system can save your team hours of manual labour by providing time-saving capabilities when it comes to creating supplier contracts.
How do you facilitate negotiations?
At the moment, do your team, your suppliers, and your stakeholders have simple and instantaneous access to contracts? Are you able to easily compare different versions through time and see changes during negotiations? Can you digitally sign and store contracts? If not, adopting automated contract system technology could improve your negotiation process dramatically.
How do you manage approvals?
Is your team consistently managing the approvals process seamlessly, always conducting proper reviews and providing the correct information, while meeting all the necessary requirements and deadlines? Searching for different versions of documents leads to inefficiency through longer drafting, reviewing and approval times.
Automated contract technology makes it easy to strategically manage approvals so you never miss a deadline and always have the right information at hand.
How do you handle compliance and mitigate risk?
Having full visibility of your contracts, suppliers and other relationships is extremely helpful when it comes to auditing, and can help you to successfully mitigate risk within your organisation. Ensuring regulatory, legal and compliance standards are being maintained is done through effective reporting, and automated contract management systems support these processes exponentially.
Surefire signs you’re in need of an automated contract management system
In order for your business to thrive, your contract management system needs to scale along with your maturity and change appetite. If this isn’t happening for you, then it can be easy to lose sight of the strategic details that really matter, and instead get bogged down in the day-to-day manual administration of your organisation.
Here are a few common warning signs that you may need to consider digitising your procurement and contract management processes in the very near future.
- Your reliance on manual processes creates bottlenecks within your team, especially if all approvals lie with just one or two people
- There’s limited cross-departmental visibility as your teams don’t share information with each other, creating inefficient and frustrating silos
- Contracts change during negotiations and even after you’ve reached an agreement, and these changes are constantly lost in your manual system
- Your procurement team can’t keep up with the demand of your organisation, and different suppliers in different locations are creating a need for more complex management systems
- Your contracting and procurement cycle times are lengthy, costly and you have no visibility on what ‘good’ looks like
Think big when it comes to procurement
All businesses need efficient contract management systems that place a strong emphasis on completing negotiations and improving outcomes. If the information in this article resonated with you when considering your organisation’s current methods, then it may be time to consider implementing an automated contract management system.
Portt is your partner in procurement. Our intelligent sourcing, contract and supplier management platform is easy to adopt, simple to use, and enables the strategic potential of your procurement team.
Contact us today to learn how you can use the software to streamline the necessary, unlock the opportunity, and realise the outcomes for your business.
Article written by: Mark Reddy, Head of Growth at Portt
