The process of managing contracts is the collection of strategies, methods, and principles that are employed by companies to streamline their contracting processes. Contract management involves a lot, from ensuring that contract obligations are fulfilled and reporting to analyze contract information.
The process of managing contracts can be broken into the following stages:
1. Contract Drafting
If you’re writing or drafting a Non-Disclosure Agreement, Master Service Agreement or Statement of Work, contracts are crucial to running a business and creating safeguards for relationships. The contracting process is often time-consuming and tedious which can lead to delays and roadblocks. Modern technology has made it much easier. Digital collaboration, automated review and tracked changes have dramatically reduced the length of contract drafting. Additionally, specialized software for managing contracts like JAGGAER Contracts can help to reduce manual errors by generating auto-generated.
2. Contract Negotiation
Negotiating terms and conditions is the next step in managing contracts. This can be a complicated cross-departmental task that often involves several versions of the contract. The goal is to arrive at an option that is acceptable to both parties, and also complies with the commercial and legal policies. Contract management software can help accelerate the contract drafting and negotiation process by providing users with templates that have been approved clauses, clauses and other approved language. It can also streamline and automate the process of reviewing and approving by facilitating digital collaboration and allowing teams to submit their reviews from any location at any time. It’s also easy to utilize electronic signatures in CPQ to speed up the executing process, which has been shown to reduce turnaround times for contracts by up to 80%.