Drive Enterprise-wide Digital Transformation with CLM

The COVID-19 pandemic turned the world upside down, compelling businesses to re-think strategies to accelerate digital transformation initiatives and keep up with the ‘new normal.’ As many as 80% of businesses fast-tracked their digital initiatives, revealed a survey by Dell, at the beginning of the pandemic.

However, for a digital transformation strategy to succeed, it is important to include contract lifecycle management as a part of the strategy. Contracts are the lifeline of a business. Organizations are a complex labyrinth of people, processes, technology, and partners, vendors, suppliers, contractors, and several other stakeholders. And the glue that holds all these entities together are contracts.

Given the pivotal role that contracts play in an organization, it contains some valuable data associated with the stakeholders. Contracts contain data on pricing, service delivery, and key performance indicators that can help define, monitor, and optimize the parameters of business performance. Digital transformation of the processes of creating and executing a contract and generating insights on potential risks and opportunities can infuse efficiency into contract lifecycle management and thereby, contribute significantly to minimizing value leakage, improving performance, and ensuring regulatory compliance.

Contracts are stored in outdated, legacy systems, and the contracting processes are handled primarily by just one or a few business functions in many enterprises. Digitizing contracts is a precursor to the digital transformation of the complete contract lifecycle processes.

Kickstarting Digital Transformation of CLM with a Digitized Contract Repository

With a smart, AI-powered contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform, enterprises can migrate their commercial contracts from across a fragmented legacy IT systems landscape into a single digitized repository. As a hub for an organization’s contracts and associated artefacts, and model contractual relationships, CLM platforms can build a standardized library of clauses, templates, and business rules to ease and streamline the process of contract creation and keep off the scope for any inconsistencies in the process.

Instilling digitization at the start of the contracting process has a cascading effect on the subsequent contracting lifecycle management tasks. CLM platforms enable a single source of truth by digitizing contracts and storing them in one place. This contract repository then serves as a foundation for applying more advanced technologies on top to derive meaningful insights. For instance, enterprises with a digital contract repository can gain a comprehensive and transparent view of the contract calendar which can help them monitor upcoming renewals and expirations, thereby eliminating value leakages, missed deadlines, and reducing compliance or governance challenges.

Further, with a digitized contract repository, CLM platforms can even enable enterprises to mine contract portfolios for performance insights and risk analytics, which can then feed the platform’s authoring and negotiation capabilities. These inputs can enable organizations to draft smarter contracts and affect better business outcomes.

Align Digital Transformation to Digital ‘Contract’ transformation with AI

Digitizing or the process of digital contract transformation provides streamlined access to contract data, which helps further its digital transformation strategies. Digital contract transformation allows businesses to digitize their contracts and contract lifecycle management (CLM) processes for enhanced agility and improved commercial engagements.

Contract digitization brings your often siloed and offline contracts online, to digitize and mine them for intelligence to de-risk your existing portfolio and sign smarter agreements. A platform like SirionOne offers a wide range of out-of-the-box connectors that integrate with your enterprise IT environment and pull in legacy contracts stored in these silos. It also allows enterprises to track performance against the contracted terms in real-time, through advanced automation that facilitates proactive review and monitoring of individual obligations and service levels.

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine automatically digitizes contracts and extracts key information such as contract metadata, clauses, obligations, service levels, and rate cards, which are then stored in a cloud-based centralized repository to enable easy access and deep analytics. The Machine Learning (ML) engine, armed with new knowledge with each contract, assimilates the contract structure and taxonomy, further enhancing the platform’s analytical capabilities

For organizations that view digital contract transformation as a key element of their digital transformation strategy, the benefits are endless. To harness insights from the contracts to deliver actionable business insights and make smart, well-informed decisions is the key to success in today’s digital world. Click here to find out how you can power your enterprise’s digital transformation strategy with SirionOne, the smarter contracting platform.