Intelligent contract workflows help accelerate the contract lifecycle but must be used in combination with workflow escalations to achieve a completely streamlined process. You and your team may be 90% compliant with getting contract management tasks completed in a timely manner, but sometimes workloads change, and you may not get to complete that assigned task by its due date. Contract workflow escalations can help eliminate this challenge by having a back-up individual who can complete the task instead.
If you’re frequently encountering delays or bottlenecks at a particular step in your contract process, contract management workflow escalations can help eliminate the slow down.
Learn how to execute a contract workflow for CLM success.
Improving Your Process With Contract Workflow Escalation
To make sure tasks don’t sit unattended, you and your team can set up automatic workflow escalations so when a task has not been completed in “x” amount of days, the next assigned user will be notified to complete the task. Workflow escalation acts as a safety net so you and your team can not only have transparency of where in the process each contract is, but also continuously be notified when things need to get done.
In addition to keeping the process in motion, contract workflow escalations can identify employee promptness to take action on any given task. This is useful for management to identify trends for those who are failing to complete tasks, so they can address the issue.
Here is an example of how workflow escalations work in CobbleStone’s award-winning Contract Insight® software:
Julie has been assigned the task of Legal Review. If Julie doesn’t complete her task in 3 days, it is then escalated to John for him to complete. Julie had an unexpected client meeting that created days of work for her, so she missed the deadline to complete the Legal Review.
John has now been assigned the task of Legal Review due to Julie missing the task deadline. He can now complete the task for Julie since she had an unexpected circumstance occur. John successfully completes the Legal Review. The next step in the workflow, Financial Review, can now be completed.
Mark is assigned the task of Financial Review. He has been alerted and has three days to complete this task. Mark sees this task alert and completes the Financial Review prior to the deadline.
Both the Legal Review and Financial Review have been completed with minimal process bottlenecks and hurdles because of the workflow escalation from Julie to John.
Discuss with your team how contract workflow escalations work so they are aware of the process functionalities. Make it clear that contract workflow escalations are made to streamline the process for occasional situations and are not meant for constant use. Management will be able to have the full picture of what’s happening at all times just by looking in the system to see what’s being completed and by who.
Check out this implementor’s story on configuring contract workflows for higher education.
It’s important to have a clear understanding of what steps need to be taken for your organization to achieve CLM success. Once contract workflow escalations are established, cycle-time reports and other built-in analytics in Contract Insight can be used to identify bottlenecks and opportunities for process improvement. Be sure to schedule a free demo of our software with guided assistance on choosing the right configurations for your system. Set yourself up for CLM success and get started with automated workflow escalations today.
