Problem
Difficulty in locating a customer contract when you need it most slows down business processes, delaying responses, leading to a perception of poor customer service, ultimately impacting relationships and repeat business – and it takes time and that means increased costs. This is just one scenario involving incomplete information in systems such as Client Relationship Management (CRM).
It’s frustrating, to say the least, when you cannot quickly and easily obtain a complete picture of a customer, supplier or partner relationship. Not being able to access the contract document is bad enough; not being able to quickly access the key contractual items is far worse. Having such information to hand improves efficiency and raises the bar for customer service, including for example:
- What are the contract renewal date and termination conditions?
- What geographic territory is covered by the contract?
- What are the price and volume clauses, when and how can prices or volumes be changed?
- What products or services are covered in the contracts?
- What are the service level agreements?
A CRM system, such as SalesForce.com, is just one of the significant investments many organizations make. Effective Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) and Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) can also be hindered by a lack of contract related data being available, without the need to go searching through other systems, paper files or contacting another department altogether, such as legal or procurement.
Solution
Seal Software Contract Discovery and Analytics quickly locates and identifies contractual documents, extracting key contractual metadata such as contracting parties, contract dates, termination clauses, jurisdiction, right of assignment, pricing and discounting, penalty clauses, automatic renewal, beneficial terms and much more.
Contract metadata can then easily be uploaded to key operational systems such as ERP, CRM, CLM and SRM to provide the complete relationship picture.
Contracts can be analyzed, providing clear and comprehensive reporting and analysis upon which informed decisions can be made. Contracts and the extracted data can be managed in Seal or exported to another CLM or other system.
Seal can then continue to monitor for new contracts, ensuring new contractual documents are also identified.
Seal can be deployed and operational in a matter of minutes and producing results in just hours, processing potentially tens of thousands of contracts and related documents. Contract metadata can be uploaded to systems such as CRM, to provide the complete picture for users. Consequently, the payback can be rapid, improving customer service, reducing delays and improving the return on investment in such systems.
