Contract Management

Definition of contract management

Contract management is the process of handling the life cycle of a contract from end to end. From creation to fulfillment, via the negotiation, signature and storage stages. Contract management is becoming a strategic issue for companies at various levels.

In financial terms: managing contracts correctly has become essential to optimize a company’s profitability

In legal terms: protecting against legal and financial risks, particularly when the volume of contracts signed grows large.

So from an operational viewpoint, contract management responds to a company’s performance challenges.

The benefits of contract management:

• Securing the process of creating and validating contracts in accordance with your management rules
• Providing a view of the contract’s progress and fulfillment in relation to the mutual commitments of each party
• Measuring any divergence between contractual commitments and reality on the ground
• Supervising the contract and monitoring alerts

Contract management should always include:

• Managing the contract’s life cycle: creation, negotiation, approval, signature, fulfillment/measurement, closure;
• Managing and supervising relations with third parties (suppliers, customers, partners, subcontractors and administrative authorities);
• Managing the results of the contract in terms of costs, performance, quality and deadlines;
• Managing any divergence from contractual commitments;

Supervising and monitoring contracts

Digitalizing the contract management process is a key way of enabling you to control your contracts.

With digital contract management solutions, you can manage all the stages in a contract’s life cycle simply and securely, with features for contract creation, approval (workflow), electronic signature, automatic reminders and monitoring of contractual commitments.

The contract manager can supervise all their contracts within a single interface. No more sharing Word documents on a network drive, chasing people up manually for approval, sending documents by mail for signature or tracking fulfillment in an Excel spreadsheet. Standard office software quickly reaches its limits when the volume of contracts grows large.

Digitalizing contracts

A digital solution provides the following features:

• Create a contract based on a template
• Automatically pre-enter contractual information based on metadata
• Publish/modify/annotate/correct the contract online
• Have the contract approved via a fully customizable workflow
• Sign the contract electronically
• Monitor the fulfillment of the contract:
  • automatic reminders of milestones: contractual commitments/deliverables
  • measure divergence
• supervision and reporting
  • contract types
  • commitment amounts

To find out more about supplier contract management

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