Contracts sit at the heart of many organizations, whether they’re supply chain or customer related, there’s no doubt that effective contract management is a valuable discipline. Knowing your obligations, and those of your suppliers, will help ensure best value and avoid disputes. Clear understanding of milestones, for example renewals or property lease breaks, will avoid unnecessary expenditure. But for most organizations, contracts have built up over many years, reside in multiple repositories (like filing cabinets and the C: drives on many individual computers), meaning that when it comes to implementing a Contract Management solution, or performing an audit on an existing one, a large part of those contracts will be overlooked.
So, the first step should surely be to perform some form of audit or discovery process to ensure you know the true contract landscape. The natural conclusion that most jump to is that this will be a slow, expensive and probably only partially accurate exercise, but why? Typically the process of identifying contracts relies on humans to “eyeball” the document and determine if it is contractual in nature. Then the key information (terms, dates, contracting parties, jurisdiction and so on) have to be extracted, in order to form an abstract of the contract that can then be uploaded into a new or existing system – and this is where the time simply runs away, as does the cost, not to mention accuracy.
There has to be another way surely? Well there is, Seal Contract Discovery and Analytics. Seal is able to automatically identify contractual documents from file shares, C: drives, content repositories and so on, and then automatically extract contractual data – this data and the contract documents themselves can then be uploaded to populate Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM), Client Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and many other systems.
To find out how Seal can help you audit your contract landscape and migrate your contracts from the filing cabinets and C: drives, join one of our upcoming webinars:
Contract Audit and Assessment Webinar
To read more about Seal Contract Discovery and Analytics, visit the Solutions page of our website.
About Steve Tucker
