There can be any number of contracts that an organisation enters into during the course of its business – employment, supplier, property, insurance, financial and the list goes on. Can you confidently say that your organization is completely in control of all its contract obligations?
Often a lack of visibility of the contract’s current status can result in a financial loss to the organization. A power utility company was asked by a rural landowner to take the power lines off his land as the organization had inadvertently missed payments on the easement to the property. Similarly, a pharmaceutical company found to its chagrin (and embarrassment!) that it had been paying a third-party supplier for license to use an enzyme for well over three years after the agreement between the two organizations had expired.
Contract management undertaken manually is resource intensive, time consuming, expensive and an error-ridden activity. Due to the numerous types, number, renewal and contract expiration dates, many organizations create complex MS-Excel spreadsheets in an attempt to stay on top of managing contracts – but it remains costly and inefficient. Typical bug bears of legal departments managing policy and contractual documents are: invariably people send incomplete information; employees don’t follow proper processes; contract-related requests are directed to the wrong individuals; there is no single repository where all contracts can be stored; requests often get lost in the deluge of emails received on a daily basis; and such.
These problems are not surprising. With multiple people working on the same document, information flow is unstructured, making tracking emails and version control a nightmare. The complexity compounds when multiple contracts with varying deadlines need to be concurrently juggled. The difficulty further exacerbates when contracts have multi-country applications. At the same time, there can literally be 100’s of existing contracts, critical internal and regulatory policy documents that only need to be updated periodically or merely renewed, but in a timely manner.
Automation is the only fool-proof way of managing contracts accurately and effectively. Technology provides processes that facilitate end-to-end visibility of contracts across their individual lifecycle, in turn ensuring that the organization meets its obligations to all stakeholders. Equally, obligations to the company are visible too – this is essential to ensuring that the organisation optimises contracts for business advantage and there is evidence that obligations were managed properly.
About Word-Tech:
Word-Tech develops DocMinder®, a functional, flexible, and cost effective task and obligation management system that provides an ideal automated solution for contract management processes. DocMinder® is distributed and supported in Europe by Ascertus Limited.
About Ascertus:
Ascertus Ltd. provides document production and management software solutions. Ascertus offers software business tools for document management, email, electronic filing, and digital filing. Ascertus serves corporate in-house legal departments, law firms, accounting practices, financial, and insurance companies in the United Kingdom.
Read the complete article from: Ascertus