Guiding Principles for Automating Contract

An increasingly frequent "ask" from SpringCM customers is to shorten their contract-to-cash cycles. How much of this can you automate? Nearly all of it, we tell them. This is our sweet spot. And we have some terrific success stories. But to stop the back and forth that is the bane of contracts—physical handoffs, missing information, interminable delays—you'll need to do your part.

Using cloud technology to enable automation without first taking a cold, hard look at the underlying process is a little like putting lipstick on a pig. If you want the optimal return on your investment, you need to get your house in order first.

Here's what I tell our customers: 

Eliminate duplication and put everything in one place. Duplicate content exists in most organizations, scattered across files shares, local drives and email in different offices and geographies. Driving out duplication and putting everything in one place is the foundation of any automated contracts application. The cloud makes this easy. Security controls make it safe.

Case in point: The global legal department of Scripps Networks Interactive maintains offices in six different cities. Supplier contracts were hard to find, and they were recreating content all the time. They centralized 60,000 contracts and amendments (and organized them to make it easy to reuse elements) to reduce the time to complete a contract by 25% to 30%.

Standardize, standardize, standardize. Standardization leads to predictable, repeatable outcomes. While there's usually some variation in every process—geographical constraints, for example—once ad hoc variability has been driven out of the process, it's easy to tweak it to drive higher quality outcomes.

Case in point: NCR, a global company with nearly 1,000 channel partners was continuing to add partners at a fast clip. They centralized their contracts in the cloud and replaced an ad-hoc, email-based process with standardized workflows for contract management and partner on-boarding-reducing throughput time from three weeks to three days.

Automate the approval cycle. The approval process is one of the biggest time sucks in the contracts lifecycle—send out for reviews, incorporate redline comments, do it again, gather signatures. Automating the process and providing visibility into contract status and bottlenecks is one of the most powerful ways to shorten the contract-to-cash cycle.

Case in point: Teledyne Controls processes approvals for approximately 1,000 quotes and orders a month, each requiring five to six signatures. Their prior approval process: hand carry printed contracts around the building for signatures-and try to catch people at their desks. With their new cloud technology they automatically route documents for electronic signature. Now they get work done in half the time at half the cost and generate reports twice as fast.

Double down by integrating systems. Today most cloud applications talk to each other. Some of our most successful customers are big users of Salesforce, which houses data critical for the creation of contracts. They quickly shorten the contract-to-cash cycle by embedding a contracts management application in Salesforce and managing the whole process there.

Case in point: Blue Cross Blue Shield takes this approach to dynamically generate contracts for dentists with geographically specific attachments, emails them to a mailhouse, where they are printed and mailed to dentists. When the signed contract is returned, they are scanned into the the contract management app. The payoff? Greater efficiencies, lower costs, fewer errors.

Build compliance into process. Every company has internal policies, procedures, and service-level agreements for how contracts are executed. Few companies, however, have automated systems in place to ensure these standards are met. Process automation ensures that work is completed accurately and on time by generating alerts if the process is out of bounds.

Case in point: Anixter captures 30+ terms and conditions for the wires and connectors it distributes. When federal regulations change, they search on contract indices and quickly determine which contracts need to be revised.

Enable mobile users—securely. We're always on, always working. Contemporary companies have no choice but to enable remote and on-the-go workers. Contract lifecycles stop when work can't get done.

Case in point: Blue Cross Blue Shield field managers are equipped with an iPad that gives them direct access to all relevant documents (contracts, forms, collateral and training guides) in their content cloud. To make sure no rogue documents are stored on the iPads, iPad email is turned off and all email, faxing and remote printing is done through their cloud application.