Digital Contract Management Solutions:

Handling contracts with clients, manufacturers, service providers, and partners is unavoidable for organisations. Compiling, editing, approving, signing, and renewing contracts can be quite a hassle, even if the majority of companies are still conducting it manually. Moreover, the issue of contract management is further complicated by legal and compliance questions: ever newer regulations are forcing enterprises to securely manage, store and transfer personal and corporate data.

Unfortunately, many organisations are wasting time and money on unsystematic contract management solutions, which becomes even more of an issue when contracts are stored digitally and in printed form at the same time. Undefined and uncontrolled workflows may result in lost documents and/or unrecognised bottlenecks, decreasing both productivity and employee satisfaction. 

Fortunately, a growing number of organisations are paying attention to this aspect of their business as they realise that paper-based contract management solutions cannot be a part of their day-to-day operations if they are truly aiming for digital transformation and workflow optimisation.

Digital Contract Management Software

Imagine:

• What if all this could be done digitally? 
• What if all this could be done using nothing else but a single tablet? 
• What exactly should organisations look for when choosing the right tool for the job?

These are critical questions, which we are going to explore in-depth now.

We have great news for those managers, department leaders, or digital transformation executives who are currently aiming to get rid of paper-based, uncontrolled, and unsystematic processes. Today, there already are several digital contract management (DCM) solutions - Itiner is one of them - that only require a single meeting to get everything sorted out, from establishing terms and conditions at the very beginning all the way to capturing the final signature. Contract management software solutions are here to serve you.

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How does digital contract management software help?

These one-stop-shop contract management software solutions are designed to address the needs and simplify the workflows of any organisation, be it a growing SME, the biggest national organisation in the industry, or an international enterprise.

A digital contract management software allows them to get rid of administrative burdens and time-consuming tasks, which in the long run have negative effects on employee satisfaction. Moreover, these contract management solutions provide easy and transparent solutions for expiring or outdated contract pools. As a result, contract renewal can be almost fully automated, or old contracts archived at the click of a button.

From a security perspective, digital contract management solutions provide the option of role-based task and access allocation, which ensures that each colleague can only view and edit the files they really need to work with. In this way, sensitive data is accessed only by authorised users. 

Furthermore, they have a single point of access, which enables managers to oversee the whole process, thus easily identifying bottlenecks, loose ends, or areas requiring optimisation.

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How should contract management solutions  work on the client-side and in the background?

First and foremost, we should stress the importance of a system that is simple to use but still allows complex customisation in the background. As transparent and easy-to-master client-facing interfaces are essential for easy adaptation and day-to-day operations, digital contract management software should provide a top-notch user experience.

To give an analogy, the tool needs to be as simple as an ATM machine that facilitates easy learning on the part of the user. In other words, it should guide the user's actions, and help them grasp what they should do, how they should do it, and when they should do it.

However, in the background, it should provide a lot more in order to satisfy even the most complex requirements of the organisation. Such functions can include the following:

• Generating contract forms and templates (every organisation produces a variety of contracts and the solution should assist with this).
• Integration: A good contract management (CM) solution should be seamlessly integrated with existing technologies to collect data, and turn it into master data that can be used to auto-fill forms. In this way, administration can be reduced by as much as tenfold.
• Integration with biometric signature solutions to ensure that contracts can legally be signed without the use of paper-based documents.
• Correlations between contracts and company profiles to make administration easier and to keep things in check much easier.

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What are the benefits of a Digital Contract Management software? 

Having elaborated on what are the most important functions of digital contract management solutions, and how they should work, let’s move on to explore their undoubted benefits.

1. Being paperless 

Most contracts are made up of tons of paper. They take up a lot of office space, while their management requires newer and newer tools, like binders, markers, shredders, etc. We all know that trees are finite resources, and cutting down trees for the sole purpose of printing on them is devastating for the environment. Fortunately, with the help of DCM solutions, we can forget about the hassle of paper-based contract management while doing something good for our environment. 

2. Decreasing costs

Analog documents take up precious office space in the case of all parties, which significantly increases the costs coming with their management. Fortunately, the costs of DCM solutions can be calculated beforehand, while there are no hidden costs involved. You can free up your office for something more useful while forgetting about the constant purchase of office supplies. 

3. Minimising administrative work

Thanks to the contract templates and auto-fill functions of contract management solutions, forms only need to be filled out once. Other documents requiring the same data will be filled out automatically from that point on. This means that administrators can save a lot of time, which they can spend on more critical responsibilities, like acquiring new clients and partners or figuring out their strategy.

4. Speeding up the contract completion process

When all the data and the necessary tools are at the teams’ disposal, they will be able to conclude any contract process - which previously may have taken them weeks or months to finish - within a day or a few days. A range of tasks can be automated with contract management solutions, while controlled and predefined workflows help to guide users through the most efficient sequence.

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What is Itiner?

Itiner is Iron Mountain’s solution, which was launched in 2002 and built to perform business software design and development, IT consulting, and IT outsourcing activities. Since then, the company has delivered over 150 successful projects to both multinational firms and government entities. The company specialises in providing operations automation, intelligent check listing, documentation and management services for enterprises and government agencies. 

Get in touch with us now if you need help with digitising your content management processes!