Contract Lifecycle Management

Contract Lifecycle Management is the proactive and methodical
management of a contract from initiation through award, to compliance and
renewal.

Contract Lifecycle Management Software provides mitigation of many of the
contracting risks that stem from non-compliance to negotiated terms and
conditions of agreements and bad contract management. The key benefits of
contract lifecycle management software are as follows:

Value delivery on either side of the agreement. Only if you are aware of the
deliverables in agreements can you take pre-emptive action on critical
contract milestones and triggers. Organisations are typically good at
certifying payments to suppliers, but not good at ensuring delivery of contract
obligations. Conversely, Suppliers do not always maximise the potential of
each customer relationship. Lost revenues and over-expenditure occur when
parties do not have good systems in place .

Mitigation of the risk of and liability in potential legal action. If you are not in
compliance with the obligations of agreements to which you are party, then
potential litigation could have disasterous consequences for you and your
organisation. Contract lifecycle management ensures better compliance to
commercially critical terms and conditions.

Central Repository

The primary objective of contract lifecycle management software is to
implement a central repository of contracts. This means a central repository
of contract data, and contract documents. The two are not mutually exclusive,
and one without the other does not provide full visibility of agreements.
Document Management is not Contract Management

Setting up the central repository of contract data and documents provides
visibility into your organisation's contractual commitments, and is a stepping
stone to corporatising corporate best practice business processes and
pro-active management of the terms & conditions of these agreements.

Contract lifecycle management mitigates the risk of not knowing what your
contractual relationships are, and who they are with. The risk of litigation and
revenue leakage due to non-compliance is managed by setting up pro-active
alerts around commercially sensitive contract trigger points, which include
deliverables, renewals, price triggers, and obligations.

Risk and Compliance Management

In order to assure your organisation's compliance with the terms & conditions
of your contractual commitments, you must implement pro-active
management of contract deliverables. Contract life-cycle management
systems provide pre-emptive alerts to commercially sensitive contract trigger
points and milestones, that email contract managers, providing advance
warning that an event is approaching, and allowing them to take the relevant
action prior to the event.

The real business of contract management is managing relationships
between contracting parties, and a contract manager can only do this if
he/she is supported by systems that process data, bringing salient
information to their attention. Contract managers who spend their days
wading through spreadsheets do not have the time to effectively manage
relationships.

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