Stop Making Costly Mistakes in your Contract Lifecycle Management

“Poor IT contract management can cost your business time, money and legal fees. Here’s how to minimize risk by focusing on restructuring contract management and training employees around compliance.”

• CIO.com (2016). ‘How to stop making costly IT contract mistakes’ Online. <http://www.cio.com/article/3099169/it-industry/how-to-stop-making-costly-it-contract-mistakes.html>

The article examines how poor contract lifecycle management and unreliable IT systems is costing organisations and businesses millions in money but also valuable man hours. The effects of mismanaged contracts can add up from legal fees and costing businesses large sums of money that they don’t need to lose.

It is understood that businesses are using systems and processes that are old and outdated and are now falling far behind in modernising their contract lifecycle management with the right contract management system because of budget. However, the article emphasises that it’s not only about upgrading the technology and process that is in place but also ensuring all your employees are invested in proper and improved contract lifecycle management and understand the implications.

The article pin points three common trends of mismanaged contracts:

1. Disconnected and disparate systems used to house contracts.
2. Inconsistent contract templates and management.
3. No control over compliance laws.

The three common trends of poor contract management can cause organisations and businesses millions in mistakes that can be easily resolved by using the right technology to manage the contract life-cycle and ensuring compliance is being met efficiently and effectively.

Our Accord Contract Management System has become the solution to help organisations in the public and private sector to overcome issues around getting the control and compliance around contract management, to in return create potential savings and adding value back into the business.

Disconnected and disparate systems are brought together with Accord; the contract management system acts a central repository to house all contract types and contracts data. A system that can handle any type of contract can also allow users to store and manage all contact and supplier data as well as digital documents, images and copies.

Centralising your contract lifecycle management means businesses can easily access and be used by multiple users in the organisation to create a more effective way to manage all the data in one place but also improve the way departments communicate with each other to reach goals around contracts management.

“By clearly identifying the importance of contract management within your organisation, as well as the people and processes involved, is vital in initiating an effective and well run contract management process.”

Organisations using Accord, are given the ability to better establish best practices for contract lifecycle management , so nothing gets missed in the process. A central contract management system will improve the management of contracts and ensure every step is undertaken to meet specifications and compliance laws so everyone is working on the same page. To understand your contracts life cycle, it is important to be able to effectively manage your interactions as well have an overview of all interactions, whether it be from past, present or future. Better management and insight of activities and relationship notes will help departments stay connected and improve collaborative working.

With more and more compliance requirements being placed on organisations, Accord offers an instant level of control and visibility that simply isn’t available in other systems. Compliance is key to for your organisations audits and is not something that should be overlooked; if compliance is not being managed in your contracts life cycle, it can lead to spending more man hours and money to fix the issues that will evolve.

Modernising the contract lifecycle management with an efficient and effective system like Accord that can be configured with the growth and constant changes of the business will help you stop making those costly contract mistakes and finally provide you with the confidence that your contracts are being manage in the most efficient, cost-effective and compliant way.

Here at Target, our team like to design contract management systems around what the business needs to meet their overall procurement and compliance goals. We’ve been creating tailor made business management systems since 2010. Need a system? Talk to us.