By: Kiran Kalyanrao Kulkarni, Global Practice Head of Lead-To-Revenue Platform products (Solutions and Delivery), LTIMindtree

“We have USD 3 million in delayed revenue now! Can you believe it?” That was one of the statements that my client’s finance manager was explaining relating to the challenges of the financing operations. “… and nobody is at fault, neither the legal team nor sales operations or even finance. Everyone is working from their own perspective and managing the contractual documents. That said, the delay in contracts has delayed the revenue…” she continued.

She pointed to a very prominent and challenging situation in every organization – small, midsize, or enterprise. If contract processing is delayed, the entire operations linked to contracts are impacted, including (but not limited to):

• Customer satisfaction (delivery and operations)
• Contracts management
• Contracts auditing
• Legal compliance
• Delay in revenues
• Financial auditing and related strategies
• Vendors/suppliers onboarding
• Renewals and amendments
• Enterprise efficiency

As a consulting partner, we studied her enterprise’s business process flow and responsibility matrix before we could do an assessment or propose any possible solution.

In our workshop with the client team, we found various challenges, which are very common across industries:

• Non-standardized legal language and templates
• Exclusion of significant clauses
• Unavailability of centralized contracts or artifacts (on or off the cloud)
• Unaligned business processes within the organization
• Unavailability of a single dashboard or report that showcases the status of the contracts
• Dependency on manual processes
• Inadequate visibility and actions
• Non-integrated process with backend / ERP fulfilment systems
• Missing obligation management workflow
• Absence of regulatory compliance processes
• A limited collaboration among various functional teams

Contract lifecycle management is significant and the backbone for any enterprise. Hence, organizations have to be agile and focused on improving this process too.

Our team has rich experience in Contract Lifecycle Management products that focuses on solving critical problems and reducing the impacts/challenges significantly. Post analysis and assessment of current business processes and determination of CLM implementation, we recommended a Cloud SAAS platform-based CLM product offering and suggested services that included:

• Contracts analysis (manual, digital)– This helps to understand the scope and volumetric in both sell-side and buy-side processes
• Contracts centralization– This makes contracts accessible anytime and anywhere; and  helps in swift auditing and regulatory compliance
• Contracts migration– This provides a single source for all contracts
• Defining business processes with automation– This helps to  restructure the repetitive and tedious processes into a simple workflow; it also reduces bureaucracy
• Defining responsibility and performance metrics including SLAs– This prioritizes, motivates, and controls people at all functional segment levels (like sales, legal, finance, and operations) to work on activities within the stipulated time to avoid delays in a collaborative manner
• Develop smart contracts– This encourages functional teams to use pre-approved legal templates (sell-side and buy-side), legal clauses,  playbooks, self-service contracting wizards, and Microsoft Word integrated contracts (for easy negotiations including beginners) and aids in importing third-party documents in the contract repository
• Leverage Artificial Intelligence– This helps enterprises  reduce manual errors, reduce cycle time, and controls, process flows with appropriate approvals and notifications process flows
• Integrate with other systems– This reduces inter-system dependencies and helps obligation management
• Zero code– This helps the admin team to configure the system with easy clicks and no-code
• E-Signature setup– This provides the flexibility of e-signature, which helps  avoid delays in the manual signature process and scanning errors

I intend to cover transformation process-related articles in the future, so please watch this space for more developments!

This has drastically improved the performance and efficiency of our client’s team.

What are the challenges at your enterprise in the contracting area? Please let us know and we will try to solve this together!