Document Management Improves Contract Management

Contract management is essential for any business, regardless of the industry, as documented contracts provide a high level of certainty in business agreements. The contracts contain the specific terms and conditions of an agreement to explain what is required by each participant, as well as the policies, procedures, responsibilities and disciplinary code.

Managing commercial contracts involves effective communication between customers, suppliers, business partners and employees. It is important to negotiate, support and manage contracts effectively to ensure compliance with written terms and conditions.

Simplify this process by freeing up your business from paper-based contractual processes. Implementing a document management solution can help your organization gain more visibility and control over Contract Management Software.

Electronic management of contracts with document management helps companies to:

• Meet contractual requirements and obligations
• Avoid risks and penalties arising from broken or incomplete contracts
• Create company-specific contract regulations
• Digitally automate contract approval processes
• Record all contract modifications and approvals
• Assign company-wide policies for contract lifecycle management

From contract creation to expiration, advanced document management solutions can improve the efficiency and accuracy of contract management to avoid risks in business processes while ensuring that all contractual requirements are met.

Creation

Document management users can reduce the time it takes to create, execute and approve contracts using web forms. The integrated and customizable design themes allow the creation of company-specific contracts that can be completed remotely, via the Web. Document management solutions also automatically keep all document histories, including version management and editing, so that the administration can easily track all document activities. By further simplifying this paperless process, users can eliminate the need to print, sign and re-scan while complying with government compliance regulations by applying electronic signatures.

Outcome

It is important that organizations provide well-executed contract management from the start in order to effectively complete the contract life cycle. With document management software, users can streamline negotiation, review, and approval of contracts through automated document workflows. Once a contract is created and ready for review, and event-triggered workflow automatically sends notifications for the acknowledgment, signature, or other future action by the maintainer. As mentioned earlier, the integrated audit trail functions will help maintain the authenticity of contract management with time and date records of each change made as a document completes its route.

Storage

Within GlobalSearch, contracts can be sorted by date of creation, modification, completion or by customer name, customer number, etc. Users can even dedicate a complete archive to the specific contract management system, with pending subfolders and completed contracts. Paper contracts digitized in the document management repository can connect to stored electronic files belonging to the participant in the corresponding contract, such as an employee, customer or supplier. When contracts expire, record retention strategies can inform staff and initiate new workflow processes to automatically reject or start the contract renewal process. Of course, not everyone should have access to these contractual agreements. The robust security of an electronic document repository provides permission-based user access so that only authorized employees can see certain contracts.

Recovery

There may be occasions when what is agreed in a contract needs to be changed. Or, if there is a problem between the parties, a contract must be used to confirm the arrangement. With the proper permissions, an employee can easily retrieve a contract from the database. This is very useful when ensuring that both parties are meeting their obligations to determine if the scope of work is fully respected. Imaged files can be stored as full-text searchable documents so that information can be retrieved immediately, regardless of the file format. In addition, document version management keeps the original contracts stored digitally and easily available for reference,

Maintaining effective contract management can improve the credibility and profitability of an organization by meeting or exceeding customer expectations. Without good contract management, it would be very difficult to keep all processes relating to suppliers, customers, partners and employees online. CMx GlobalSearch helps businesses efficiently manage the creation, execution and analysis of contracts to maximize operational performance and minimize risk. In fact, GlobalSearch aims to improve all areas of activity through innovative electronic processes.

CMx ContractExperience provides simple contract management software system with in-built electronic signature and contract management technology solutions to all size companies,