We live in interesting times, where the winds of international strife and global problems are felt incredibly keenly – but you shouldn’t let that get you down!
Things “not going to plan” has become the new normal, but what’s the solution to facing a challenging market and consistently overcoming it? The answer may be found in your contracts.
While only 10% of contract language focuses on what’s being delivered, the other 90% is a goldmine of business-critical intelligence dedicated to what happens when things don’t go as planned.
Learning to harness that 90% to help mitigate risk and drive new strategic value from contracts in an uncertain future is a key goal for Agiloft and SaaSam, but you - the users, businesses, and enterprises - still need to connect the data within your contracts to the key people across your organisation to start to unlock your full potential!
With the right systems and processes contract data becomes business-critical intelligence and insights that ultimately deliver more strategic value. The more data you have access to and the ease with which that data can be communicated and shared internally, the larger your ability becomes to act upon contract data and deliver the intelligence to optimise wider business outcomes.
In difficult or uncertain years, there is a heightened interest in supporting and building sustainability, resilience, and agility. Recently, companies have been exploring how AI technologies (read more about Agiloft's brand new AI tech here!), contract lifecycle mangement platforms and other governance, risk, and compliance solutions can improve these three key pillars, and for good reason: businesses run on contracts. If you want your business to run better, to be more agile, better optimised, and more efficient, it helps to start right at the core with managing those contracts correctly and getting good, actionable information out of them.
Luckily, not only do we have one of the best CLM implementation teams in the world, we’ve also got four critical steps to help you pivot from efficiency to resilience with CLM!
Step 1: Gettin' Digital With It
Build a strong foundation by digitising your contracts.
Enterprises should digitise contracts and manage them with a customised CLM, giving you a unified solution to manage contract sustainability, consistency, completeness, searchability, ownership, and risk management—in one place. This approach gives your legal team a line of sight to risk and business obligations, which, in turn, helps every department make better, more nimble business decisions and negotiate from an informed position.
Need to gain a real-time view on contractual risk at a contract portfolio level? A CLM can help. Need to identify revenue opportunities from the data in your sell-side contracts? A CLM can help. Whatever the use-case, organisations need a flexible CLM system that allows teams to make these adjustments quickly.
Step 2: Simple, Strong, Strategic Strands
The more areas connected to the CLM implementation, the better it will be.
Successful CLM implementations connect multiple stakeholders across an organization who initiate or interact with their contracting process. This includes Legal teams, who perform the work on individual contracts, Sales teams, who own the relationship with the customer on the sell-side, and Procurement team, who own the relationship with the supplier.
Ensuring the CLM provides simple, connected experiences to the tools these teams use daily is key. The data from your CLM must also flow to the downstream operational and transactional systems that your teams are using to do their jobs. Achieving these connections has historically been difficult, but advances in no-code, drag-and-drop integration platforms means platforms, like Agiloft, can now provide the connectors to thousands of these platforms and enable the seamless flow of data across business functions.
Step 3: Analyse This
Ensure your CLM provides the tools teams need to make sense of their contract data – from data visualisations, data extraction, and semantic search, to tracking the performance of a contract during its active life.
Getting deep contract insights from unstructured contract data will ultimately inform your business strategy, so being able to transform the unstructured world of contract language into structured digital assets is central to a business’ ability to transition toward achieving more strategic outcomes. Using the tools in an Agiloft product, you can start to make your contracts work for you and with a multi-departmental adoption you can start getting a wider view of the entire business.
Step 4: Transform and Roll Out
Digitising, connecting, and analysing all lead to a transformative, actionable information that will be better for your organisation and your customers.
Once your organisation has turned its unstructured agreements into accessible digital assets, which represent the DNA of their organisation’s relationships, you can monitor the performance of those relationships at a meta level, giving them agility and nimbleness.
For example, if a CLM connects to an adjacent ERP system and determines that a supplier has not delivered goods by a certain date, the CLM can alert the relevant teams so they can course correct. A CLM can also flag early signals of a future risk on contractual performance. Leading CLM solutions can automate compliance and allow proactive remediation of any non-compliant contracts by connecting to trusted sources of legislative or regulatory intelligence and then flagging any changes on the horizon.
Going beyond transforming contract performance, with an Agiloft CLM solution you can enhance business decisions and improve customer experience - enabling your business to not just survive, but consistently optimise, improve, and thrive in challenging market headwinds.
If you’re looking to set sail with SaaSam today, please do not hesitate to contact us at: solutions@saasamgroup.com to get your journey started in making your contracts work harder and more efficiently than ever before!
Original words by Em Atteberry (https://www.agiloft.com/blog/4-critical-steps-to-ensure-clm-provides-strategic-value-to-enterprises/), webinar by Andy Wishart and Alla Valente (https://resource.agiloft.com/all-content/contract-lifecycle-management-making-the-transition-from-operational-efficiency-to-strategic-value). Additional words by C. Redpath.
