Let’s Talk About Contracts Management and Collaboration

A recent study showed that nearly 70% of respondents felt that the relationship between two functions in the contracts management process needed to improve. Ease of collaboration keeps involved stakeholders alerted and on task throughout the entire contract lifecycle.

In contracts management, efficient collaboration between multiple departments and stakeholders is a must. Contract requests, renewals, and almost everything in between can involve many processes and manual work, holding a high potential for inefficiency if adequate and productive measures are not introduced. To avoid communication delays and contracts management bottlenecks, organisations need to leverage collaboration tools of a robust and innovative contracts management system.

Here are four steps to productive collaboration to accelerate the contracts management lifecycle.

1. Automate Contract Requests

Insufficient contract request processes can leave organisations facing a higher risk of data loss, as well as create a confusing request intake process, and delay contract cycle times. By automating contract requests this will allow your organisation to cooperate and collaborate in a user-friendly and straightforward yet comprehensive manner. Contracts management systems can drive collaboration between your stakeholders to streamlines the entire request process, decreasing the complexity, and making the process more intuitive, efficient, and accurate.

Innovative contracts management feature and tools that promote simple, seamless, and direct contract collaboration between stakeholders during the request phase can really set the stage for an efficient and more accurate contract lifecycle with fewer bottlenecks and data entry errors.

2. Simplify Contract Documents and Contract Negotiations

Collaboration on a document and version tracking involving contract negotiations can be simplified with a fully functioning contracts management software solution. A central contracts management system enables collaboration with key stakeholders, by providing tools for secure and efficient document management and version tracking the file. Ultimately making contracts management and any document control more efficient, giving collaborators the chance to track changes, swap clauses from a pre-approved clause library, and track document version history.

With a configured workflow, and an innovative contracts management system, stakeholders can access relevant contract documents for review. With a built in Supplier Portal, external parties, and employees without access to the software can access documents related to contracts they are involved with, but not core system features or irrelevant contracts, so documents they need to work with are isolated so that they can make and approve changes straight from the portal. Additionally, you internal stakeholders can handle the approval process in this one centralised location and receive automated alerts regarding who needs to approve, in the interest of avoiding delays.

By simplifying how you manage and control contract documents you can create a collaborative space in your contracts management system so between stakeholders and external suppliers, collaboration is made easy and efficient.

3. Advance Approvals Collaboration

Manual processes for new agreements, policy updates, HR documents, addendums, and more can be a thing of the past thanks to contracts management systems; organisations can have the ability to send thousands of documents out for approvals collaboration in bulk.

Organisations can send documents out for approvals after the contract negotiation is complete. Innovative contracts management software can provide a unified contract repository within a centralised system for end-to-end management to ensure approvals are made and tracked so contracts can quickly move forward. Documents and contracts can then be easily sent out to relevant departments and users, and stakeholders can approve from virtually anywhere at any time.

4. Better Compliance Management

Legal, regulatory, and other compliance standards – as well as obligations agreed upon by contract parties, can be adhered to and maintained with the help of user-friendly and robust reporting tools, key dates, contract analytics, and renewal requirements. Improving your compliance management with reporting and auditing tools can give your organisations visibility into contractual relationships across business entities.

Innovative compliance tools to improve compliance reporting, means you and your team can easily send reports, share contract analytics, and increase compliance with collaborating stakeholders.

We’ve seen some amazing results from our Accord Systems. Accord Contracts Management Systems is a leading system that delivers collaborative stress-free contracts management, to manage all of your Suppliers, Contracts and Spend Data. Our recent exciting survey results help testify with one client even going so far as to say: “Accord has revolutionised the way we undertake supplier and contract management”.

Take the pressure off you and the team. Digitise and automate your contracts management process to drive collaborative working.