Shorten Contract Processing Time by Up to 50% with DocuSign CLM
Contract is found everywhere, from signing a sales agreement, procurement to employment contract. Discover how you can speed up contracting processes.
Shorten Contract Processing Time by Up to 50% with DocuSign CLM
Contracts are found everywhere. Whether you’re signing a sales agreement, procurement contract or employment contract, contracts formalize relationships between businesses and individuals. It contains terms and conditions indicating the obligations to fulfill, for how long and at what price. In this article, we will share how you can do business faster by shortening your contract processing time by up to 50%1 with DocuSign Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) system.
What Does a Contracting Process Look Like?
Step 1: Before the contracting process begins, two or more parties have to agree to work together in a mutually beneficial way.
Step 2: The contracting process begins with the creation of a contract containing all necessary clauses. It’s critical to ensure all clauses are indicated clearly during the contract authoring process. Any ambiguity in the clauses or wrong usage of grammar has to be corrected as the language used determines the real meaning of a clause. You will also have to take into consideration a country’s regulations especially when the contract is signed between parties from different countries.
Step 3: After a contract is generated, all parties involved will negotiate until everyone agrees with the final terms. The agreement will then be sent for signing via a courier, an email attachment or digital signing.
Step 4: Once a contract is finalized, you either store the finalized contract physically or on your company server depending on the contracting method.
What are the Gaps in Today’s Contracting Process?
- Generating a contract: The most commonly used method for generating a contract is still using standalone tools like Microsoft Word (68%) and Google Docs (50%). Organizations that are reluctant to transition from conventional contracting (via paper or email) suffer from lengthy contract generation processes.
- Contract negotiation: Standard steps such as collecting signatures, spotting mistakes, and getting legal approval are often the biggest challenges to speeding up negotiation. Due to the lack of a CLM system to share and collaborate on revisions simultaneously, human errors arise when keeping track of and ensuring the latest version. Organizations generate multiple versions of the same contract before finalizing the contract, causing unnecessary mistakes in the contracting progress.
- Contract routing: If you are still relying on postal mail and fax to send contracts, there are risks of document loss and reduced visibility. In addition, contracting parties are more prone to sharing the contract with the wrong external party.
- Contract approval: Organizations that still send contracts for approval via paper or email run into serious problems at scale. Let’s say there are 5 unique people involved in the contract approval process, the delays and inefficiencies caused by each of them will further delay the contracting process. A survey conducted by DocuSign reflected that 30-40% interviewees experienced delays in signature collection.
- Storage of contracts: Organizations that still rely on file cabinets or servers to store agreements face difficulties in locating a contract. On average, people take an average of 45 minutes to locate the right file and nearly 90 minutes to find a specific clause within the agreement. It’s crucial to make contracts easy to find in order to speed up contracting processes.
How to Overcome the Gaps with CLM?
A suitable CLM tool can help streamline contracting thus accelerating business processes. Enhance collaboration across teams and strengthen contracting compliances by organizing, automating and customizing agreements with CLM. To drive business intelligence, FUJIFILM BI HK offers DocuSign CLM tool that comes with artificial intelligence (A.I.) and analytics. It helps you manage contract smarter and faster by surfacing trends, risks and opportunities.
Create Contracts with Ease
Our CLM tool allows you to create contracts easily, enabling you to generate documents with templates and a clause library.
- Auto-populate new agreements with data extracted directly from your Salesforce account.
- Set conditional rules to review non-standard terms.
- Enable your legal team to define a library of pre-approved clauses.
Collaborate and Negotiate Faster
To enhance collaboration, our CLM tool keeps everyone on the same page and brings teams together to get contracts done faster.
- Automate contract routing for internal and external review with detailed version control.
- Complete reviews fast with comments and tasks to notify users and let them take action via email or Slack.
- Speed up the entire contracting review with A.I.-assisted negotiation capabilities.
Automate Contract Workflows
Remove bottlenecks and blockers with automated workflows to keep contracts moving.
- Use a drag-and-drop editor to design contract processes.
- Over 100+ pre-configured workflow steps are available for you to generate, review, approve, send for signature, store contracts, and more.
- Use our CLM system in conjunction with the tools your team is already using with pre-built connectors and rich APIs.
Manage All Contracts in One Place
Store all your contracts in a searchable repository with permission controls to manage contracts all in one place.
- Provide a central, accessible source of truth for your legal department and other users.
- Manage obligations, renewals and more with agreement reports.
- Search and filter agreements by keyword, concept and meta-data.
Uncover Opportunities, Risks and Trends
Use A.I. and analytics tools built for contracts to save time, reduce risk and make contracts more discoverable.
- Extract, analyze and report on key contract data points and legal topics with over 100 pre-trained A.I. models.
- Conditionally drive workflows with analytics, risk scores and contract content for faster contract cycles.
- Surface insights that help close sales deals faster, reduce procurement costs and speed up legal review.
How can FUJIFILM BI HK’s DocuSign CLM solution help you stay focused on business growth rather than contract management? Contact us for a FREE consultation now!
References
2 https://www.docusign.com/blog/five-stages-contract-management