Contracts underpin the way businesses work and the bigger the business, generally, the more contracts there are to manage. Medium to large sized organizations typically find that a manual approach to contract management eventually leads to chaos and a lack of control.

Effective management requires granular, repeatable activities to occur at each stage of a contract’s lifecycle and a manual system cannot support the level of work required.

An enterprise contract management solution provides a secure central contract repository, giving complete visibility to everyone who needs it and helps businesses to create a single source of truth for standardized working.

Intuitive software also automates internal processes, helping large businesses in particular process contracts and their metadata more efficiently and effectively.

Larger businesses are often geographically spread with team members working across the globe. This geographical distribution has been made more commonplace by the growing trend of working from home in light of COVID-19.

In these circumstances, localized databases of contracts and other information are quick to develop and can easily lead to disparate data and inconsistent ways of working.

This lack of standardization can lead to inaccuracies, contract risk, costly mistakes and a lack of collaboration across the organization. In enterprise-level organizations, these risks are exacerbated by the fact any single contract can be required to pass through multiple departments such as Procurement, Legal, Sales and IT.

Cloud-based enterprise contract management solutions can resolve and prevent many of the issues listed above through centralization and improved accessibility for contract data.

Traditional working silos are eliminated, internal contract processes are standardized and the whole organization can work together to drive maximum value from contracts.

Many enterprise businesses have to manage a larger volume of contracts while meeting stringent regulations and layers of compliance requirements. This is especially true for organizations within healthcare, pharma and financial services industries.

Regulation of these industries in particular dictate that a business’s contracts and suppliers need to be carefully monitored to ensure that relevant certifications or insurance documents haven’t expired and risks are being minimized.

Data protection is every bit as important as other regulatory requirements, especially for enterprise businesses that are operating in multiple jurisdictions.

For organizations managing thousands of complex contracts, using a spreadsheet for compliance tracking, monitoring and data protection is impractical and takes up too much time, resource and effort.

Enterprise contract management software automates compliance efforts. It provides businesses with timely alerts and notifications when a contract or its associated certifications are about to expire, allowing the business to act ahead of time and ensure any obligations and regulatory requirements are being met.”