Contract Management Software can benefit any organization that needs to manage contracts or agreements, but one of the most common objections is the cost. Understandably, budgets are a considerable factor in all business decisions, but low-cost contract management comes at a higher price.
Why Low-Cost Contract Management is Deceivingly Expensive
Manual Contract Management: Low-cost contract management is the manual process of document management that leverages Word, Excel, email, and a file storage system. While this makeshift solution may provide some level of control over contracts, in contrast, it presents costly challenges around visibility, security, productivity, compliance, and accountability. Ultimately, manual contract management is unable to support the full contract lifecycle.
Low-Cost Contract Management Software: At a base level, contract management software should provide a secure repository, searching, reporting, and alerts. The benefits include better organization, centralized records, and data protection.
This type of solution doesn’t typically support the full contract lifecycle and can prove to be ineffective for organizations requiring a configurable solution that is user-friendly and able to evolve with changing processes and a growing organization.
Low-quality contract management software may present challenges with limited features and configurability, inadequate document storage capacity, inflexible permissions, and a finite number of users.
Over time, low-cost contract management software will inevitably cost more when it fails to fully support processes, doesn’t have the flexibility to scale with an organization, is difficult to adopt, and lacks the level of ease, automation, visibility, and predictability required to get the most value out of your contracts.
Invest Now, Save Big Later
The ROI of Advanced Contract Management Software: With so many solutions to choose from, organizations should invest in contract management software that improves processes, reduces costs, minimizes risk, and saves time.
Advanced contract management software provides contract analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to help organizations move beyond drafting, negotiating, approving, and signing...on their timetable.
Leading contract management software, like CobbleStone, offers advanced features to reduce overwhelming contract management situations, and is backed by an expert implementation and support team who will configure the system to meet your needs. CobbleStone will expand the features as your process evolves, and position you to make better decisions, reduce cycle times, mitigate risk, have a clean audit trail, and remain secure.
The initial investment in high-quality, advanced contract management software may be more, but the long-term positive impact makes it clear that the low-cost approach to contract management will cost much more in the long run.
Making the Case for Contract Management Software
For contract management software users, the ROI of an advanced contract management platform is obvious because you get first-hand experience with:
- Drafting and storing documents easily and securely
- Managing more contracts in less time
- Mitigating risk
- Improving collaboration, communication, and negotiation
- Importing legacy contracts for automation and insights
- Taking control of renewals and expiration dates
- Using analytics and AI to make informed decisions and build better relationships
Justify the investment to stakeholders by making it easy for them to see the value of transforming your current contract management processes versus continuing an inefficient, error-prone, unorganized, and risky contract management strategy.
4 Steps to Show the Value of Contract Management Software
- Review contracts across your entire organization to identify the impact they have across all departments.
- Identify blind spots around the total value of contracts and contract status.
- Quantify the financial impact of your current process based on lost contracts, missed renewals and expiration dates, lost vendors, missed pricing and negotiating opportunities, and compliance or regulatory issues.
- Show the cost savings of advanced contract management software that will be easy to adopt, is user-friendly, is fully configurable, and easily scalable for the future.
Advanced contract management software can help organizations reduce contract management expenses up to 50%.
Consequently, a low-cost approach to contract management comes at a high price that is simply not worth the expense, lost opportunity, and potential risk. To see how advanced contract management software can help your organization and how affordable it can be, request a free CobbleStone Software demo today.
