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IACCM (The International Association of Commercial Contract Management) research has found that 70-75% of failing projects occur due to contracting and commercial issues, resulting in an average of 9.2% revenue leakages. https://www.iaccm.com/news/contractingexcellence/print/?newsletterid=82. Therefore, commercial management and commercial control are essential, and organisations are quickly realising the business relevance and business value to implementing and operating Contract Management Software, with more and more successful implementation showcasing the high impact it has on business including improving effectiveness, efficiency and productivity of operations.
In today’s digitally connected world keeping contracts in the filing cabinet is archaic, and businesses are understanding why Sharepoint and File Drives are also not the optimum solution to storing you contracts properly . In Gartner’s December 2018 Market Guide for Contract Lifecycle Management (https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3895881/market-guide-for-contract-life-cycle-management), it states:
“Document management systems and shared drives don’t support contract reporting and analytics. Without contract analytics, organizations cannot manage workloads, performance and compliance”.
Contract Management Software also contributes to risk mitigation and performance maximisation, ensuing stakeholders are aware of their obligations and communications are seamless regarding renewals, payments, extensions, contract performance etc. Therefore organisations are rapidly implementing Contract Management Software to streamline their operations and free up the time of Contract Managers to focus on more value- add activity such as commercial negotiations, supplier performance management and commercial optimisation.
The Top 9 benefits of Contract Management Software are:
1.) Makes Commercial Management a Priority
Implementing a Contract Management System generates a renewed focus on your commercial processes and contract documentation, creating momentum within your internal Commercial / Procurement teams, and delivering outputs to internal business stakeholders, suppliers and your customers giving you organisational tempo to deliver fast and impactful changes.
2.) Discover your Contracts
During the discovery and implementation phase of your Contract Management Software, our team will work with your business to identify, locate and store your customer and supplier contract. This means that through the activity you can stabilise your contracts portfolio and ensure that your data collection is complete and accurate. Your contracts will then be stored in a cloud-based contract repository allowing you to access contract information, stakeholders and files within a few clicks.
3.) Upload and Understand
During the implementation phase, we will migrate all your contracts onto our Contract Management platform, including populating the tool with key commercial information such as contract price, contract term, liabilities and termination clauses and much more. This delivers you contract analysis as well as delivering on the contract implementation phase, resulting in an improved contract management approach for your business, and acting as an independent contractual review which can highlight improvements.
4.) Renewals Management
Our system can set up renewal notifications to ensure the right people are made aware when contracts are expiring. You set the parameters, whether 30,60,90 days before end date, or you can set a custom period. This will help minimise cost increases as a result of automatic renewals and ensure you are organised and in control of both your supplier and customer renewals, keeping your pipeline moving and ensuring your suppliers are delivering value for money.
5.) Enhance Commercial Processes
Working through a Contract Management implementation allows for a robust review of your existing processes and allows us to providing consulting including advising on best practice and lessons learned from other clients to optimise your processes and deliver business value to your internal customers. Implementing Contract Management Software also aids how business processes and functions work, giving you definition of the necessary mechanisms, inputs and outputs and helping identify and deliver organisational objectives.
6.) Segment your Customers
Contract Management Software is the first step to having a robust analytics capability within your organisation and our solution allows for customer segmentation, allowing you to understand what you are selling and where and in which verticals. You can see which contracts are associated with which customers, enabling you to explore consolidation opportunities which serve in both yours and your customers best interests.
7.) Track your Suppliers
Just as important as the customer position is the supply chain, and Contract Management solutions enable the collection and cleaning of data, allowing you to structure and develop a robust and exploitable analytics capability for your supply chain, allowing for effective procurement categorisation and enabling true supplier performance management.
8.) Informed Spend Analytics
Our platform allows for effective Spend Analytics, allowing you to truly manage the fixed and variable costs of your direct and indirect suppliers, and using this data to identify improvements and inform business decisions. You can look for consolidation opportunities and use this data to inform your overarching procurement strategy.
9.) Audit & Compliance
Our solution allows you to store and examine contracts digitally in one place, allowing for enhanced visibility and making finding contracts and contract information much easier. This not only increases productivity, freeing up resource for more productive things, but it also supports regulatory and contractual compliance, informing other business processes and delivering streamlined contract accountability. This is crucial to ensure you prevent financial, operational or reputational loss & risk.
We hope you find these benefits useful, and please contact us at info@commercial-consulting.co.uk to learn more.
Our Contract Management migrations are simple, fast and effective. We target 1 month from Contract Signature to Go-Live, delivering you increased commercial control, cost savings and streamlined business processes that are the right fit and easy to implement.
