DM1805

Dm FEATURE: CONTRACT MANAGEMENT
Achieving Contract Management Nirvana
EASY SOFTWARE UK's Howard Frear discusses how brands can better protect a vital
business process of contract management
Inefficient manual processes still
bedevil too many CFOs when it
comes to a central business process:
how they manage their business
contracts. How so? Because the
contracts their teams create are
typically created in Word and then
emailed around the business for
review; deadlines are managed via a
spreadsheet and Outlook calendar
entry. There's no unified process, things
vary between not just sectors but
companies and even departments - and
the lack of any cohesive process means
risk and error creeps in. Yet contracts
are some of the most important
documents within the business.
But that's nonsensical when you think
about it, as contracts are one of the
most vital assets for any business:
nothing gets bought or sold without a
contract being produced. Yet research
shows that, on average, businesses
could boost their bottom line by an
average of 9.2% of value if they
improved their contract management
approach.
CATCH 22
It's not a process that firms can afford
to get wrong. That's why a growing
number of organisations are starting
to think about a better way to perform
all their Contract Management
processes, namely in a more joined-up
way using technology support: as it
stands, 80% of companies still don't
have any sort of Contract Management
tool in place, and The International
Association for Contract & Commercial
Management says there is little to no
technology support for the
management of those contracts, so the
flows of data within the organisation
important to the performance of a
contract don't exist.
As a result, businesses are caught in a
catch 22: if they don't have a process
to monitor the cost for lost revenue
opportunity, then they've not got the
method of collecting the data to
16
@DMMagAndAwards
May/June 2018
www.document-manager.com