How to Implement End-to-End Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) Software?
What is Digital Contracting?
Digital contracting is creating, managing, and executing contracts digitally, transforming the entire contract lifecycle into a smooth and collaborative workflow. It handles every aspect of the contract lifecycle, including preparation, drafting, editing, negotiation, signing, implementation, and management. It seamlessly integrates with other tools in your workflows.
Why do we need digital contracting?
If you are involved in contract management or legal work, you know how time-consuming it can be to create, handle, and negotiate contracts. Contract managers often must start from scratch for each new agreement, without using templates or automation. This becomes draining when dealing with multiple active contracts, which is common in medium to large companies.
Digital contracting software like ConvergePoint offers a solution to these challenges. By optimizing the contract management lifecycle (CLM), digital contracting provides quick access to data, processes, and stakeholders involved in contracts, enabling faster agreement execution. It facilitates collaboration with different business departments, automates workflows, offers various signing methods, and centralizes all contract-related activities. This way, you can easily track who is doing what and stay updated on your ongoing contracts.
Furthermore, it provides valuable insights into contract performance, empowering data-driven decision-making for your business. No longer will you need to spend countless hours creating, editing, and negotiating low-value agreements from scratch. Instead, digital contracting allows you to focus your time and energy on tasks that require innovation and strategic planning.
Key Features of ConvergePoint Digital Contracting Software
Digital contracting software like ConvergePoint transforms how businesses manage agreements, making the process faster, more accurate, and extremely convenient.
Here is what makes it stand out:
Automated Contract Creation
“Say goodbye to starting contracts from scratch!”
Contract creation is made easier with AI-powered drafting tools and pre-defined templates. Without having to worry about missing necessary clauses or making manual errors, you can alter details to meet specific needs.
Simplified Negotiations
“Negotiating doesn’t have to be messy.”
Multiple stakeholders can simultaneously evaluate, comment on, and alter the contract through real-time collaboration features. Immediate tracking of changes removes misunderstanding and saves time spent on endless email threads or manual document comparisons which smoothens contract negotiation process.
Communication and Workflow Alerts
“Never miss an important deadline or approval.”
Stakeholders get notified about pending tasks, approvals, or deadlines by automated alerts. This shows that everyone is on the same page and that there are no unnecessary delays in the contract lifecycle.
A Digital Hub for Storing Contracts
“Forget the chaos of filing cabinets or scattered digital folders.”
All contracts have been organized in one location by a centralized repository, which allows metadata searches for contract retrieval when needed. This means that you always have the most recent version on hand and saves time.
E-Signing Options
“Speed things up with electronic signatures!”
These safe and legally valid signatures enable contracts to be signed and executed right away, irrespective of the parties' locations. The contract can be signed with a few clicks, avoiding the need to print, scan, or mail documents.
These features save time and reduce human errors, making digital contracting a necessary tool for modern businesses. By automating key processes, legal team, procurement managers and compliance officers can ensure smooth operations while maintaining compliance regulatory and operational challenges across these departments.
Digital Contracting for Legal Teams
- Automate manual processes such as contract creation, approvals, and tracking for increased efficiency.
- Ensure transparency and accountability with built-in audit trails.
- Stay compliant with regulatory requirements through notifications and alerts.
- Access real-time contract data to quickly respond to inquiries and track progress.
- Make informed decisions faster with instant visibility into contract statuses.
Digital Contracting for Compliance Officers
- A centralized contract repository provides secure storage, making it easy to access, review, and audit contracts.
- Simplified contract tracking is designed to enhance governance and streamline compliance processes.
- Automated reminders and alerts for deadlines, renewals, and milestones to prevent non-compliance and missed opportunities.
Digital Contracting for Procurement Managers
- Access detailed analytics to evaluate contract performance and identify opportunities for cost savings.
- Leverage insights to renegotiate terms more effectively for better outcomes.
- Utilize structured workflows to streamline approval processes, ensuring faster and more organized operations.
- Reduce bottlenecks and expedite the procurement process with efficient digital tools.
What are the fundamentals of digital contracting?
Digital contracting utilizes digital tools and a centralized cloud to store and manage contracts. Here are the core benefits of digital contracting:
- Quickly find information about your intellectual property contracts, such as upcoming deadlines and agreed-upon terms, with a few keystrokes. Accessing contract details becomes a matter of seconds.
- Previously, contracts were often difficult to access as they were stored in various physical and digital locations. With this searchable digital hub, authorized team members can easily and securely access contracts whenever needed.
- Stay ahead of deadlines, respond promptly, and speed up the process. Creating agendas and drafts becomes significantly faster as well.
Digital contracting provides various signing methods
“The signing solutions make it easier for people to sign anywhere and anytime, which is the type of frictionless experience that vendors, employees, customers, and partners expect.”
Integrating software with an electronic signature provider simplifies the contract process for legal departments with complete audit trails, version history, and metadata for contracts and signer actions. This eliminates the need for slow paper-based exchanges and reduces the reliance on printing and scanning in hybrid systems.
Companies like DocuSign and Adobe EchoSign offer digital signatures, which uniquely identify the document and signer. This ensures that the signer matches the signature and prevents unauthorized edits, forgery, and tampering, safeguarding signer's authenticity and data integrity.
Explore our Contract Management Software - CRM, eSignature and Office Integrations
More automated and streamlined contract processes
Contract processes are renowned for consuming valuable time and energy due to their complexity, extensive communication among different parties, and the need for extensive negotiation. Fortunately, digital contracting offers a solution that simplifies the contract management process. With software like ConvergePoint, digital contracting platforms enable quick construction and implementation of contract approval and generation processes.
The software provides a centralized location for all requests, allowing you to view all processes briefly. Additionally, they offer robust workflows that simplify contract creation. You can also select template, customize clauses, identify fields for completion, and add signers and approvers. Furthermore, the Software ensures compliance with legal and organizational requirements without the need for manual review. Digital contracting tools provide up-to-date approval routing templates and guardrails to guarantee automatic contract compliance.
Better team collaboration
"Finally, digital contracting tools offer a collaborative team experience."
Digital contracting platforms aim to eliminate communication barriers and enable collaboration between departments. By providing a centralized contract storage hub, these platforms facilitate information sharing among different departments. Legal teams can collaborate with other departments by granting them permission to access and contribute to contract drafting, management, and execution. This multi-departmental collaboration allows for the creation of higher-value and more tightly constructed contracts.
Additionally, digital contracting solutions offer benefits such as gaining insight into contract prioritization and considering relevant contract histories. They also provide the ability to update departments on the status of ongoing contracts and deals. Some platforms, such as the ConvergePoint software, further enhance collaboration through real-time editing, negotiation, and commenting features, ensuring everyone involved can effectively work together.
ConvergePoint: The Smart Way to Digital Contracting Success
As technology continues to evolve, we can expect digital contracting to become even more sophisticated, with the emergence of new tools and technologies that will transform the way we manage contracts. The fundamentals of digital contracting with ConvergePoint Contract Management Software are essential for modern businesses looking to optimize their contract management processes.
With its robust capabilities, ConvergePoint’s digital contracting software built on SharePoint, checks all these boxes, providing a secure, and centralized system to manage contracts effectively.
Talk to our sales team and rejig the way you handle contracts digitally!
