Managing your company’s contracts is not a simple, administrative task. It is a key business function to minimize operational risks. With remote working on the increase, it is becoming more important than ever to replace manual processes with an automated contract lifecycle management (CLM) system. Manually setting up contracts and passing documents back and forth, increases the chances of errors, bottlenecks, and missed deadlines, which amplifies disorder.
Being able to digitally store contracts in a secure centralized repository with user role security allows selected employees to negotiate, initiate, and renew contracts with instant management approval. Tracking the contract progress through notifications on critical dates, terms, and milestones, provides real-time monitoring that is visible to the highest levels of the organization. Optimizing business processes is the first step to achieving success.
Comparing Selected CLM Solutions
This article focuses on three American-based contract lifecycle management providers with their listed benefits and available solutions. All three vendors have free trial options with varying subscriptions based on the number of users or contracts.
Concord
Concordnow.com is a cloud-based platform that offers contract lifecycle management solutions for sales, legal, HR, and procurement teams. It facilitates effective control through creating, negotiating, signing, and managing contracts across the company for employees and different departments. Streamlining processes from online negotiation, verifying e-signatures, and overall contract completion ensures audit compliance and efficient contract management.
Main Benefits
Concord’s contract management platform gives an organization the ability to setup and effectively administer contracts faster by providing the following benefits:
- Promotes online real-time collaboration
- Transparency of contract status
- Easy approvals and renewals
- Automate and optimize workflows
- Access power analytics and reporting
Solutions
Concord’s rich features include full integration with enterprise applications like Google Docs, Salesforce, and Dropbox for a flexible solution implemented for all the teams within a company.
- Sales teams can sync with Salesforce to generate contracts, automate approvals, negotiate online, and produce custom reports.
- Legal domains will benefit from automated compliance, approved templates, maintain version control, for full audit trails, and utilize legal digital signatures.
- Procurement departments can deliver on efficient savings with instant access to every supplier contract to monitor SLAs, keep track of exclusivity clauses, and eliminate unnecessary spending.
- HR can recruit and easily manage teams through employee contracts, bulk communication, personnel libraries, and ensure data privacy.
DocuSign
DocuSign is a software application designed to manage electronic agreements and e-signatures. The application helps companies of any size automate their processes to prepare, sign, and manage agreements. DocuSign can be used on multiple device types to accelerate any agreement management process. eSignatures are fully compliant with the USA and European regulations.
Main Benefits
DocuSign allows the quick creation and effective management of secure, digital agreements from any located and on nearly any type of device. It is a simple to use, easy to implement solution so complex workflows can be automated quickly.
DocuSign offers the following valuable business benefits to accelerate the pace and decrease the cost of business processes:
- Eliminate or reduce paper usage.
- Electronically automate agreement processes.
- Increased compliance.
- Reliable and trusted e-signature service.
- Highly secure encryption standards for all transactions.
Solutions
A range of solutions are offered through DocuSign’s applications that can also be accessed through its free mobile app compatible with Apple iOS, Google Android, and Windows Phones:
- DocuSign’s eSignature API offers over 300 integrations to build custom, end-to-end workflows through the DocuSign Agreement Cloud.
- DocuSign hybrid cloud solutions, the DocuSign Signature Appliance and DocuSign Security Appliance for organizations in regulated industries.
- DocuSign CLM (Contract Lifecycle Management) streamlines the electronic agreement lifecycle by transforming manual processes into automated digital workflows.
- DocuSign Gen for Salesforce to automate agreements through the Salesforce user interface.
- DocuSign Negotiate for Salesforce helps automate the generation, negotiation, and approval of custom agreements. Through Salesforce, sales teams can manage agreements for customers and products using pricing data.
Parley Pro
Parley Pro is a cloud-based, contract lifecycle management platform that helps businesses effectively and quickly negotiate and manage contracts. Traditionally, contract management has been a manual and comprehensive process prone to shortfalls that leads to increased risks and frustration. Parley Pro offers a customized solution to automate and streamline the contract process from end-to-end.
Main Benefits
Parley Pro’s solution reduces risk in contract errors, improves compliance with audit trails and version control. It is designed to automate and streamline the contract management process while offering enriched, real-time collaboration.
With total control over the entire process, your organization can achieve greater transparency with high-end tools to manage, measure, and analyze every step in the contract management process.
- Actionable contract process insights are transparent through contract KPIs, patterns, and milestones.
- Customizable interactive contract analytics dashboards.
- Improve results through smarter contracts.
- Never miss contract deadlines.
- Provide an enhanced internal and external contract process experience.
- Accelerate the contract management process.
- Promote efficiency and with a faster completion process.
- Achieve high quality contracts.
Solutions
ParleyPro’s modern contract lifecycle management software is designed for Legal, Procurement, and Finance departments to achieve the following:
For Legal Teams:
- Best-in-class contract automation platform powered by smart, real-time collaboration
- Increase team productivity
- Establish compliant contract processes
- Augment decisions with data
- Build strong business relationships
For Procurement Teams:
- Reduce procurement cycle times
- Automate contract management
- Establish consistency and governance
- Centralize contract repository
- Integrate CLM with ERP, CRM, or other systems
For Finance Teams:
- Automate your entire contract lifecycle
- Establish consistency and governance
- Centralize contract repository
- Integrate CLM with your ERP and other systems
- Close deals faster and cost-effectively