5 Benefits of Using Flexible & Automated Workflows During Contract Lifecycle Management

Flexible, automated workflows inject speed, accuracy, and consistency into your contract processes. Today’s modern Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) software can give you the capability to define, measure, and control your organization’s contract workflows in ways never before possible. With this enhanced control, you can confidently adjust how people and software interact while performing contract tasks and activities. You can also measure your workflow successes to optimize their usefulness and ensure your organization continually receives benefits such as: 

• More reliable and consistent standardized contracts 
• Easier adherence to corporate governance protocols
• Improved risk assessment and minimize contract risks
• Enhanced visibility with data analytics, and
• Save resources, including time and money.

Create more reliable contracts that use standardized, pre-approved language.

In the past, the language of an agreement would depend on its author. Too often, that meant individual lawyers or business executives would pull up outdated personally-managed contract templates.

Automated contract workflows avoid this type of variation. The workflows follow the exact steps you set out to eliminate the inconsistencies inherent in personal preferences. Business users answer questions or select drop-down values from menus. Based on their input, CLM software produces a ready-to-sign contract that includes all the necessary details and appropriate jurisdiction-specific language and clauses that have been pre-approved by the legal department.

Your legal department can maintain contract and clause template libraries that are constantly updated to meet ever-changing regulatory requirements. This ensures executives always use the most effective contract templates. Automated workflows also ensure contract drafters use your company’s preferred and fallback positions during negotiations. That means no matter who produces an agreement, you and the company can feel confident in the legal work produced. Deals can be closed faster, and in-house lawyers no longer need to repeatedly review the same basic language. 

More easily adhere to corporate governance protocols.

You can incorporate adherence to your company’s security and governance protocols into each workflow and template. Decision-based contract workflows rely on “If this, then that” (IFTTT) logic. When lawyers build situation-specific templates and workflows, they decide what actions “this” and “that” describe. When others use the template or workflow, they remain within the guardrails set up by the legal team. 

Ensure compliance

You’re able to embed business rules and policy guidelines in automated workflows to ensure compliance. For example, you can set a contract routing workflow to restrict final approval until all edits and issues are handled and every required approval is obtained. On-demand audit trails and tailored dashboard views help you monitor compliance the entire way.

Develop automated contract workflows that minimize risk.

Effective contract workflows that help you administer and oversee contracts also help you better understand, track, and mitigate risks. For example, you can track payments that impact cash flow to better understand the costs if a contract is terminated. Automated reminders ensure business teams don’t miss deadlines or milestone events.

Contract workflows offer built-in guidance that helps contract drafters avoid the risks of adding improper language or omitting essential provisions. As lawyers are well aware, just because a contract’s terms don’t directly relate to cash flow doesn’t mean they can’t impact revenue. Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities help to target individual provisions such as indemnity and liability clauses and detect contradictory or suboptimal language more effectively. Negotiators can then address risks earlier in the negotiation process. When terms go against your company’s preferred position, a preset workflow can forward the contract to the legal team for review.  

Make data-backed decisions with improved visibility.

Organizing contracts within the security of Parley Pro establishes easy access to structured business data. Data analytics extracts the business intelligence housed within your contract portfolio. For example, data analytics can help you determine factors such as:

• the most commonly used types of contracts in your company, by department
• the most heavily negotiated contract clauses
• where bottlenecks prevent workflows from advancing quickly

Contract data analytics gives your business teams the critical insights they need to engage in informative discussions and make smarter, data-backed decisions–which is what they need to quickly respond to continually evolving market forces. 

Help your legal team save time, effort and money.

You can build automated workflows that accelerate deals by instantly routing contracts for review, approval, and signature to ensure the right people sign-off in a timely fashion. Templates use standardized language that doesn’t require additional review. Your legal team saves time and effort that translates to saved dollars by avoiding the need to continually re-create the same contract language or negotiate the same points over and over. Your lawyers gain instead focus on more meaningful legal work.

Track and revise contracts instantly

Responding to change is faster, too, when you can track and revise contract workflows and templates instantly. For example, your legal team can quickly identify which contract templates contain a specific provision affected by a recent regulatory change and populate the necessary revisions instantly. They can also do the same for executed contracts and use workflows to start implementing the actions to send addendums as necessary. 

Avoiding risk brings its own financial benefits. Forbes reports that about 60% of supplier contracts automatically renew without buyers’ noticing because they forget to terminate. CLM software’s automated tracking and notifications of milestone events warn you of auto-renewals ahead of time. You can avoid the costly error of leaving your company on the hook for another year of paying excessive fees for a vendor contract you wanted to re-negotiate.

Subscription- and cloud-based software such as Parley Pro also has additional advantages to traditional software setups including: 

• Lower start-up costs than on-premise implementation methods. 
• IT maintenance is provided by the vendor.
• No need to pay for large data storage facilities or the costly security efforts to keep data safe. 

Greater control of contract management brings unmatched benefits.

Put your legal team in control of the contract workflows that engage business users and streamline activities. Parley Pro enables you to establish automated workflows that ensure users follow the appropriate course of action throughout a contract’s lifecycle. Parley Pro’s enhanced technological features, advanced capabilities, and powerful integrations will empower your company to adapt to and implement change quickly and with the flexibility you need.