Contract creation is a multi-faceted process. Without the proper procedures, your organization can suffer from increased risk, drawn-out contract lifecycle times, and missed opportunities - among other deleterious consequences. Contract documents and data stored on spreadsheets, email servers, and shared drives alone can result in lost contract documents and versions. Back-and-forth contract drafting via email can result in slow collaboration times and unclear document versions. An inadequate clause management process can result in the wrong clauses being included in contracts and missed opportunities. Wet contract signatures can result in long send-to-sign times and costly postage expenses. What's more, risk can increase, resulting in lost revenue, data leakage, lawsuits, and more. Fortunately, you can leverage contract management software to avoid sending your contract creation process into a tailspin. To that end, here are six ways contract creation software can improve your contracting process.
#1 - It Can Centralize Contract Storage
Leading-edge contract creation software can allow you to centrally store contract data, contract documents, and other essential CLM assets with robust security access and organization. A web-based, secure contract repository can allow your contract administrators to tinker with user permissions so that only those necessary within your contract management team can access particular mission-critical contract documents, contract data, and more.
Additionally, a contract creation and management software platform with contract artificial intelligence can allow your team to improve contract analysis and transform statically stored contracts into dynamic building blocks for proactive CLM oversight, improved opportunity realization, and robust risk mitigation. Contract artificial intelligence with machine learning can help your organization retain maximized ROI from your contract repository system. Essential data from newly introduced documents can be intelligently mapped and converted to tidy out-of-the-box or user-defined contract data fields.
An AI-powered contract repository can also help your team supercharge data protection. Your team can identify crucial data such as counterparty data, locations, financials, phone numbers, key dates, milestones, and more from contracts. This repository feature can reduce the need for time-wasting, tedious, and error-prone manual data entry while increasing security around sensitive and vital data.
#2 - It Can Streamline Contract Drafting
One of the best contract creation software tools you can leverage is a state-of-the-art contract drafting interface. Contract creation software can help your team author documents using templates to merge contract data fields with clauses from your organization's pre-approved language library. This feature can help your team produce compliant, timely, and more accurate contract documents.
Your team can also leverage templates such as those for FAR, DFAR, and GSA contracts if necessary. Your organization can also include CLIN (contract line item numbers) within contract templates. You can easily export contract documents as standard file formats such as MS Word and PDFs.
Robust contract creation software solutions also allow you to work with documents online in-system to:
- create new contract documents straight from a contract data field page.
- import new documents into a contract data field page.
- and seamlessly edit documents straight from a contract data field page.
#3 - It Can Enhance Contract Collaboration
Contract creation and management software can also improve your contract collaboration processes.
Convenient contract creation connectors can further enhance your processes, such as those for concurrent online document editing within MS Office 365 and Google Workspace. You can leverage these connectors to collaborate with internal and external contract creation stakeholders concurrently online for a familiar editing and word processing experience.
You can also leverage contract creation software for optimized document collaboration and version control.
Say, for example, one of your users downloads a document version of "XYZ Agreement" from that agreements contract data field page. The user can then reattach that document with redlines they have performed and tracked. In this case, trusted contract creation software can create and maintain an audit trail that improves document oversight - complete with automated version numbers when edited.
Additionally, with content control, your contract creation and management system can be configured so that if changes are made to clauses and sections within a contract document, that clause's owner can be notified. This clause ownership feature allows your contract administrators to assign an owner to a particular contract clause.
If the assigned clause is drafted into a contract - and a contract stakeholder attempts to edit that clause - your CLM system can promptly add that clause or section owner into the contract collaboration process - according to a rules-based sentiment.
#4 - It Can Increase CLM Productivity & Accountability
AI-based contract creation software can be configured to assign a "score" to your users based on their utilization of available tools for risk prevention tools. Contract administrators can hold employees accountable for their observance and attentiveness in leveraging risk prevention tools at their disposal within contract creation software.
For example, Tom's contract management software team only utilizes 40% of the tools available to them - according to the tracked usage of those tools within contract creation software. In this case, Tom's users are not even leveraging half of their contract creation software risk response tools. As a CLM software administrator, Tom is prompted to improve practices with specific insight into how his team is lacking - improving accountability.
Digging deeper into our example, suppose Tom finds that his team is not putting adequate time into tracking contract approvals. In this case, Tom's team can adjust its approval process. With this insight, the team reallocates the necessary resources to oversee risks associated with counterparty activity during contract approvals.
As such, your team can continuously improve processes with checks and balances to stay alert and accountable - maximizing ROI.
#5 - It Can Improve Contract Risk Management
Continuing with discussing risk, advanced contract creation software can provide robust insight into contract risk assessment thanks to risk rating and mapping features for your team. Contract risk profile ratings can help your organization's contract administrators and users to visualize risk variables proactively. Based on tracked risk, contract creation and management software platforms can provide your organization with a risk assessment matrix to visually engage in risk analysis.
Your team can view risk probability patterns for events within contracts and exposure that results from contract risk variables. This level of insight into the potentially damaging consequences of a risky event can help your contract administrators proceed with a specific contract. Visualizing hypothetically risky events associated with a contract can inherently reduce risk and allow your contract admins to move forward with educated risk mitigation decisions efficiently and quickly.
#6 - It Can Positively Transform Contract Signing
Contract creation software can positively transform contract signatures by replacing wet signatures with expensive postage and error-prone processes with electronic signatures!
Contract creation and management software with electronic signatures can streamline signing and approvals with a fast and user-friendly process. You can cut send-to-sign time by as much as twenty percent with an innovative contract document toolbox, various placeholder settings for signing, one-off contract signatures with a highly accessible signature collaboration portal, and rules-based signing configuration options according to your organization's needs.
Get Started With Robust Contract Creation Software
With all of the tools mentioned above for decreased risk, increased revenue, and a more efficient and centralized contract creation process, you would be remiss not to leverage state-of-the-art contract creation and management technology. It's time to boost your contracting processes with the only solution that offers the tools above and almost countless more. That solution is CobbleStone Contract Insight®.
CobbleStone Contract Insight is user-friendly and highly configurable to your organization's needs for contract creation and so much more. CobbleStone® has been a visionary pioneer in contract lifecycle management since its inception in the mid-1990s. The features available with CobbleStone Contract Insight can powerfully equip organizations to manage contract creation, proactively manage risk, oversee contract compliance, rapidly draft documents, track costs, obtain alerts, sign documents with electronic signatures, and lessen contract management costs due to diminished productivity arising from outdated contract creation and management methods.
Discover why thousands of contract managers across industries trust CobbleStone with their contract creation and management needs, from contract requests to contract renewals and more. Book your free demo today!
