7 Key Areas to Add Value with Automation in Your Contract Workflows

Speed and flexibility are essential to your company’s survival in today’s fast-moving digital world. Contract lifecycle management (CLM) software automates routine tasks to accelerate workflows and lead to faster contract approvals. As we discussed in the blog, Why Flexibility is the Most Important Aspect of Automated Contract Workflows, ensuring your contract workflows are flexible is critical to your company’s long-term health.

Contract automation is a valuable way to add value to your contract workflows. Automated contract generation can save time and money by streamlining the contracting process. Additionally, automated contract management can help you manage risk and ensure compliance with contractual obligations.

Here are seven areas where flexible automation adds more value to your contract management workflows:

1. Pre-Drafting Communication.

Prior to drafting a contract, internal stakeholders must assess your company’s needs and determine what’s at stake in the relationship the company is about to enter. They must also assess the motivations of the other parties. How do current market conditions affect those needs and the monetary values associated with the agreement? What terms will help negotiators arrive at the optimal balance between value and risk?

CLM software offers a collaborative online environment for company leaders, department heads, experts, and executives to share their views and priorities with each other. CLM software incorporates all input and dialogue into a single, easily accessible discussion board. Lawyers are more informed to help them spot potential risks as well as new sources of value while drafting contracts, and to ensure contract outcomes align with the company’s broader objectives.

2. Standardize templates and optimize contract and clause performance.

Procurement, sales, HR, and other departments often draft and negotiate agreements on their own. Some keep a store of personally constructed templates to work from. Each person’s stash of templates is different, having been created in a piecemeal fashion. The templates never get updated to meet the latest regulatory requirements or to focus on the company’s long-range vision.

Piecemeal templates also miss out on another critical benefit: data analytics that help lawyers determine the performance of previous contracts. Data analytics allows you to assess which contracts and which clauses lead to the most favorable results. Based on this data, your legal team can set up a contract library and a clause library that offers standard templates geared for optimal performance. 

Business users access the pre-approved templates to create high-performing contracts. Most importantly, the legal team creates and manages the templates to ensure their continued effectiveness. When a change is made to one clause, it can automatically be populated through the entire library.

3. Make contract generation a self-service process.

CLM software enables companies to establish a formal process that allows staff members to generate contracts independently. Users fill out electronic intake forms through which the system collects all the information it needs to automatically populate templates and generate new, ready-to-sign contracts. Parley Pro integrations allow staff members to create contracts directly from within SalesForce, MS Word, and other applications with the click of a button. All actions are pre-set and occur according to the processes you and your legal and executive teams set out. That means your organization’s high-level vision remains intact while staff members generate more higher-performing contracts through a self-service process. 

4. Simplify version tracking.

Automated version tracking tools work in Parley Pro’s structured and controlled environment to eliminate the man version-tracking issues of traditional, manual contract negotiations. The system captures all comments and edits in a single version of the contract. Reviewers see them in an organized, unified manner through an online discussion board.

As comments and revisions are addressed, CLM software automatically stores them for fast, easy referral any time. On-demand audit trails instantly reveal each comment modification, and activity whenever needed.

5. Automate and speed contract approvals.

In the past, sending a sales contract to legal for review often stalled and sometimes even stopped profitable deals from coming to fruition. Automate contract approval workflows can send contracts to the right stakeholders, in the right order, at the right time to close deals and capture fast-moving opportunities quickly. 

Dashboards show managers the status of each contract as it makes its way through review and approval. The ability to apply conditions to specific types or categories of contracts enables each department to establish processes that meet their unique needs and ensure consistency and continuity in their contract workflows.

6. Enable fast, secure e-signature.

The ability to sign contracts electronically significantly reduced the time, money, and effort required to close deals and quickly ignite profitable business relationships. What was once a time-consuming and laborious process has been digitally transformed into a fast, secure, automated workflow. CLM software ensures every issue is dealt with before routing the final contract for e-signature. It also shows who signed on behalf of each party, including the time and digital location to create a permanent record of signature. 

7. Automate notifications for end-to-end reliability.

Parley Pro’s customizable, interactive dashboards clearly display each contract’s current status along with other important milestones and relevant details. Create automatic dashboard alerts to notify individuals whenever they need to take action. Automatic reminders of upcoming review deadlines, potential conflicts, and unresolved issues keep negotiations moving forward. 

Parley Pro can alert the appropriate parties of issues such as violations to the agreed standards of contract performance. When specific conditions are met, such as when a specific date passes or payment is deposited, Parley Pro will automatically notify the interested stakeholders.

Flexible workflows support the benefits of automation.

Contract automation software gives you the control you need to develop scalable contract negotiation and management workflows. Accelerating contracting processes helps your company gain and hold onto the benefits of being early movers and fast actors in ever-changing business environments. See how you can remove unnecessary friction between legal operations and business departments and increase productivity today. Schedule your demo of Parley Pro now!