4 main problems faced by contract management users

Contracts are easily one of the most essential parts of any business. Thus, managing thousands of contracts can become complex, challenging, and time constraining. Organizations often run into the same common issues that slow down the entire contracting process. It is the contract manager’s job to ensure compliance with what’s written in the contract, manage further obligations and meet the correct deadlines. Hence a clear, comprehensive and enforceable draft is necessary in order to successfully execute any contract. Not having the perfect contract management and drafting practices, leads to loss of assets and potential business.

Yet managing contracts doesn’t have to be this way—it can be simple, easy and streamlined. With a fast, easy and reliable contract management platform, companies can solidify processes that will help avoid pitfalls altogether. Some of the major issues faced by contract management users are mentioned below:

• Lack of Involvement and Clarity

One of the biggest pitfalls in contract management is the lack of clarity and scope of the goals and agreements among the involved parties. Without clear objectives, contracts become daunting and both parties are at risk of signing a contract without being entirely sure of the agreement they are entering into. It is always advisable to brainstorm some of the known issues that may occur in the lifecycle of a contract and negotiate thoroughly before embarking on the implementation process. It usually becomes difficult for the involved parties to meet often to discuss certain points and issues which are then overlooks and in turn affects the lifecycle of the contract. But with the perfect contract management system you can overcome this, like smartContract provides options to present the draft to involved parties either through email or through an online portal called party portal and negotiate contracts easily and on real time basis. You can also avoid security issues as the emails sent containing the contracts can be password protected, thus giving you a better communication and negotiation system.

• Maintaining Contracts and Remaining Compliant

While many contract management platforms provide you a workspace to draft one, they tend to forego the space to store them for future use. This becomes a major issue when you are required to revisit your old contracts or prove certain obligations. More often than not remaining compliant and securing your contracts is the number one thing that keeps one up at night. Security and compliance will always be an ongoing challenge, even more when the content that is being dealt with is supposed to be sensitive information. Thus, contracts need to be organized efficiently so that they are easy to find, track and report on. If hosted on the cloud, the platform needs to meet a host of compliance levels to make sure your data is secure and integrated correctly with your existing infrastructure. With smartContract- Contract repository can hold hundreds of contracts and only the authorized signatories can search, view and retrieve the contracts within sub seconds using a fast and accurate search wizard that can search even within contract documents in readable and pdf formats.

• Missed Deadlines and Lack of Obligation Management

Your team likely puts as much energy as one can muster to maintain compliance, organizational speed and deliver solutions to your clients. But these contract management challenges — which never seem to ebb — can bring that energy down. Often contract obligations get such poor air-time from legal departments and stakeholders who are tasked with contract management activities that you tend to miss your deadlines and could be directly linked to penalties. Effective contract management system should be able to provide greater visibility and control over the contract processes by providing more logical environment and also a platform where obligations and deadlines can be tracked down and adhered to. To reduce such challenges, smartContract, allows obligations to be allocated to business users, who are automatically reverted when a relevant obligation is due. smartContract also provide a platform with best practice procedures and KPIs which can be linked to contract obligations and form part of a comprehensive program in the contract obligation management.

• Rushed Approach to CLM Implementation

Most business professionals will advise that implementation of contract management software should be done in stages. Unfortunately most companies do not see it that way and attempt to do big band implementations which more often than not backfire and leave the users exasperated because they do not get a chance to change, adapt and make use of the functionality of the new system. To rectify this granularity of the system and streamline workflows smartContract solution is built on a dynamic, flexible and scalable architecture that can replicate your existing business processes and address the needs of businesses of any size and complexity. Thus, smartContract gives you with one of the best CLM solutions and platform in the market.