Contract Management

All companies, at some time or another, will be involved in creating legal agreements. Startups are creating non-disclosure agreements while companies that have been around for a while have sales agreements; terms and conditions; licensing agreements; commission plans; 401k documents; employee stock options; etc. All of these agreements will go through some creation/approval process that could involve several people and many reviews.

Some Issues with Legal Agreements

This section is not intended to be a complete list of issues, but these issues are on many company lists:

 Customer input does not always track from the customer through legal.
 Legal agreement processes tend not to be formal leaving many steps to be done ad-hoc.
 Exceptions are not handled in an organized fashion.
 The process can sit for days or weeks with little or no forward progress.
 For a sales agreement, there is a fine line between being protected and spending so much time on the agreement that the customer doesn’t want to place the order.
 Participants in the legal agreement process and their management are unable to get real time project status.
 Management reports are often created manually resulting in days of work and potential inaccuracies.
 How do you know which agreement is the agreed upon document?
 Where are these contracts stored?
 Who can have access to them?
 Often, companies would prefer to edit an existing contract than write one from scratch.
 Often, companies will hire an employee whose only job is to manage the process of creating an approved contract.

Most companies have an informal process in place and when tasks are completed on time and move from one step to the next, there doesn’t seem to be a problem. It is when tasks are late, or when you can’t find some piece of information, or when your boss comes around asking about the status of some agreement, that you can become frustrated.

REQUEST A DEMO

 Solutions Home

 Process Optimization

 Lean & Six Sigma

 Product Lifecycle Management

 Contract Management

 Business Process Management
  (Front Office)