4 a closer look at saperion ecm contract records - Saperion AG

Executive Summary
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The challenge
Contracts are essential to modern business. They define virtually everything we do,
whether insurance, leasing, rent, communications, maintenance and service, or licenses.
In most cases, two parties use contracts to define what shall be regulated
and how as well as what amounts will be paid by whom. Contracts even define
when and how the contract itself will become invalid. With that, we have already
mentioned two important contract terms that must be kept in mind. In any case,
contract terms must be observed by a variety of employees, particularly when a relationship
involves secondary agreements or penalties that are applied when specific
terms are not upheld.
Various people in many different departments may close contracts. In many cases,
these contracts are retained in paper form in multiple locations. When other people
require knowledge of the contracts, copies are created and distributed. To
make things more complicated, contracts have a lifecycle and are subject to
change. The updated versions must then be redistributed.
You can see already that things can get very complicated very quickly. If termination
deadlines for building leases or software services are missed, the company
may be forced to continue paying the charges. If the wrong version of a contract is
referenced or if important information is missing, managers may make incorrect
decisions and incur contractual penalties. However, even the process of initiating a
contract may generate documents that could be relevant in a future legal dispute.
For this reason, any associated documents should be archived with the contract
from the very beginning.
The importance of having the right solution
Having a reliable contract management system enables optimized collaboration
with customers and partners from both legal and strategic perspectives, allowing
the firm to avoid unnecessary risks. This white paper describes how employees of
your organization can use SAPERION ECM Contract Records to handle these tasks
efficiently.
Your employees depend on rapid and straightforward access to contracts, correspondence,
proposals, decision documentation, secondary agreements, notes,
e-mails, and more as allowed by their access rights. The key to achieving this is to
consistently optimize document handling processes from the moment a document
is created and throughout its entire lifecycle. What's more, these processes must
work irrespective of location, time, and data format.
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