Contract lifecycle management is the structured management of contracts to maximize financial and operational performance and minimize risk. While often underestimated, the importance of effective contract lifecycle management cannot be overstated. Traditional contract lifecycle management processes can be fraught with complexities, especially as organizations handle an increasing volume of contracts. The challenges include ensuring contract compliance, maintaining updated records, and managing negotiations and approvals efficiently.
Great Minds Software streamlines these aspects by introducing automated workflows, critical alerts, and comprehensive document management through a robust contract lifecycle management software, providing you an invaluable asset in modern business practices, so you can achieve success.
Essential Steps in the Contract Lifecycle Management Process
Identifying Needs and Requesting Contracts
The process begins with identifying the need for products or services. Great Minds Software’s Contract Advantage provides Self-Service Contracts and Contract Request Portals, enabling users to efficiently request new contracts, ensuring all necessary information is captured from the start.
Contract Preparation
An effective contract lifecycle management process begins with thorough preparation. Utilizing templates and having a centralized database as provided by Great Minds Software’s Contract Advantage ensures consistency and accuracy. The software’s customizable fields and document generation capabilities allow for the swift creation of contracts that meet specific organizational requirements with no coding required.
Contract Negotiation
Negotiation is critical as it defines the terms and conditions that will govern the contractual relationship. Contract Advantage offers user-customizable workflow templates to route the contract among all relevant personnel. This facilitates faster turnaround times and enhances the collaboration between involved parties.
Contract Approval
Post-negotiation, contracts undergo a rigorous approval process. Contract Advantage optimizes this step again with electronic workflows that automatically route documents to the relevant stakeholders. This minimizes delays and errors, ensuring that contracts are approved in a timely manner and comply with established standards.
Contract Execution
The execution phase involves the formal signing of the contract. Great Minds Software’s available Digital Signature Module™, integrated with Contract Advantage, allows for seamless execution with electronic signatures. It integrates with DocuSign to support the digital execution of contracts, which are then automatically stored and managed in Contract Advantage. This not only secures the signed documents but also links them directly to the associated contract records.
Contract Maintenance and Compliance
Once executed, ongoing management of contracts is vital. Contract Advantage provides continuous monitoring and automated alerts for key dates like renewals or deliverables, ensuring compliance and operational continuity. The system’s extensive reporting capabilities enable regular audits and performance assessments, ensuring obligations are met and identifying opportunities for renegotiation or renewal.
Best Practices in Contract Lifecycle Management
Centralized Document Management
Centralizing contract documentation in a single, searchable repository is crucial. Great Minds Software enables comprehensive document management, allowing users to attach files, keep versions, and perform full-text searches across documents, ensuring easy access and control.
Automated Alerts and Reminders
Timely actions and reminders are pivotal in managing contracts effectively.Contract Advantage‘s automatic emails, known as AdvantageAlerts, inform stakeholders of impending contract milestones and compliance requirements, reducing the risk of missed deadlines. The Administrator sets up both the frequency and look forward period of these alerts with no coding required.
Comprehensive Reporting and Analytics
Utilizing the robust reporting tools provided by Contract Advantage, companies can generate detailed reports on contract performance, compliance, and other critical metrics. This data is key in making informed decisions and strategizing on contract renewals or modifications.
Regular Audits and Compliance Checks
Regular audits are necessary for ensuring compliance and identifying discrepancies within contract lifecycle management processes. Great Minds Software supports these efforts with features allowing detailed historical audit trails and extensive search capability, thus upholding integrity and accountability throughout the contract lifecycle.
Our Product Offerings
Great Minds Software has developed a robust Contract Advantage portfolio tailored to address all stages of contract lifecycle management. The suite begins with Contract Advantage WebEssentials, which lays the foundation for organizations by offering essential features such as automatic email alerts, custom display options, renamable fields, and a full-featured document management system. This system is designed to facilitate the creation and management of contract documents, including those requiring signatures, efficiently covering the basic contract lifecycle management needs.
Enhancing the core offerings, the WebPro variant broadens its reach, providing additional capabilities like Intellectual Property tracking, Financials, Asset Management, and more, making it the middle-tier product designed for more intensive contract lifecycle management endeavors.
At the top tier,Contract Advantage WebPro WebElite expands upon the features found in WebEssentials and WebPro, adding advanced functions such as a Clause Library, Custom Pages and Fields, mass document and email generation, Electronic Workflow, and User-defined Reporting. It represents the most comprehensive solution for sophisticated contract lifecycle management requirements.
Contract Advantage available additional products further enhance the process at the beginning by starting at the point where a need is identified. The Contract Request Portal permits business users to place requests for goods and services or contract documents to initiate the contracting process.
Contract Lifecycle Management Customization
Contract Advantage stands out with its customizable nature, empowering users to tailor their contract lifecycle management experiences. Modules and features within the system can be activated or hidden to align with specific business needs. Most fields are configurable, allowing authorized users to choose what to display, what to conceal, and even rename fields to fit preferred terminologies and processes for their industry.
The system’s flexibility extends to its deployment options. Customers can purchase Contract Advantage for installation on-premise behind their firewall, ensuring total control over their data, or opt for a Software as a Service (SaaS) model hosted on Great Minds Software’s secure, SSAE16-compliant servers. Both setups support Full Edit or View Only user access types and provide for Named or Concurrent user licensing.
Security and Compliance Features
Security and compliance are paramount in contract lifecycle management, and Contract Advantage addresses these concerns with a multi-layered security strategy.
The system tightly controls user access through role-based permissions, utilizes Active Directory for secure authentication, and supports Single Sign-On (SSO) and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for enhanced security. Each interaction with the system is tracked in a comprehensive history audit trail, timestamping user activities along with before-and-after snapshots, ensuring full accountability and transparency.
For further compliance assurance, Contract Advantage incorporates extensive searching and reporting features, facilitating over 120 distinct reports, each with the ability to be run in several ways. Users can create their own searches on more than 400 fields, perform full-text searches on all documents, and retain queries for future use. The software’s data import and export capabilities also bolster its compliance prowess, making system data manipulable and reportable in common formats such as Excel, Word, XML, and PDF.
Additional Features and Support
Concluding its extensive feature list, Contract Advantage goes beyond the basics with a variety of functions to streamline contract lifecycle management processes. Users enjoy automatic AdvantageAlert emails, user-defined dashboards, and full text searchable documents to ensure quick retrieval and action. The software also supports multi-language and multi-currency options, accommodating international operations.
For contract development, the system offers sophisticated document assembly and version control, while the powerful search engine ensures that no detail is out of reach. Electronic workflows, insurance tracking, and the ability to manage real estate, credentialing, and other specialized contracts add further depth to the software’s capabilities.
At the heart of Great Minds Software is a commitment to fast and effective support, ensuring that clients can utilize Contract Advantage to its fullest potential and tailor the system to be their best-fit solution for contract lifecycle management excellence.
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