How contract management can streamline entire business operations

Contracts are everywhere you look in today's world: within employment processes, housing agreements, business-to-business partnerships, legal proceedings – they transcend many parts of human activity, and are a critical focal point for agreements and obligations across the world.

While they have existed since antiquity, the pervasiveness of the contract across society in 2020 has demanded the need for efficient tools to manage them, so organisations can keep track of the many that are signed each year.

Hyland's Contract Management Solution does this and more. It gives organisations the ability to manage the entire contract lifecycle, from request to approval, expiration to renewal.

It leverages automation, storage, tracking, collaboration and more to grant legal departments total visibility into the entire process.

On June 18, Hyland will be hosting a webinar which will explain in depth the benefits of Hyland Contract Management Solution, and inform enterprises the extent to which day-to-day business can be streamlined using it.

To get a better understanding of the tool in preparation for the event, TechDay spoke to Hyland director of Asia Pacific Eugene Chng, who walks through the key features and benefits of the solution.

The solution addresses the entire lifecycle of this process.

First, it provides users with a simple revision and budgeting tool. This gives the ability to not only create a contract, but to edit the contract itself throughout different versions of the document as it changes, with the ability to track these changes.

Another area is around the routing of the contract, which ensures multiple levels of scrutiny from different arenas of an organisation – whether it's between the legal team, the finance guys, the CEO and executives.

This means that when the contract gets approved, everyone has their stamp on it.

Another important capability is the clause library. This is a function where users can extract standard terms and conditions to reuse throughout different contracts.

This means that when users start creating a contract, they do not need to rewrite every clause in the contract, especially if they are generic. This facilitates the ease of drafting a contract.

The solution also allows people to review the document and create markups. For example, if there are terms in the contract that you might want someone to relook at, users can create a mockup or insert a comment requesting approval. If users see something that they don't understand, or don't agree with, they can route it back.

With this solution, users can insert clauses, write comments, revise the contract itself, and more. This means everybody has this collaborative effort around making sure that the contract itself has been agreed upon.

We integrated with signing software – so if a company uses DocuSign, we can incorporate these electronic signatures into the solution.

Speaking of collaboration, we also included capabilities for organisations to collaborate on contracts with other companies.

So if you need to work on a contract with someone who's not within your company, you can put the document into a shared drive called Share Base, where they can then access the document to do the necessary editing.

It improves the sourcing process of the organisation, and enhances control over the data.

It also allows the organisation to have full visibility of all the components and liabilities of the company with respect to the contracts.

Users can use it to see which contracts are due for renewals and which are expired. They can also use it look at regulatory compliance requirements, making it much easier to adhere to the contracts.

I think they will benefit from understanding the importance of having a contract management lifecycle tool in place in the company.

They will be able to learn how they can automate the process itself, and understand how they can leverage that information for other areas of the business.

The webinar will also go through how users can save time, effort and money, while gaining control over the way the contract management process is being managed.

To register for the webinar on June 18, click here.