Business thought leaders often say that cash flow is the “lifeblood” of any organization. But it is also true that contracts are the food and water that keep that blood going. They are the “fuel” that steadily flows to an enterprise’s various parts and then back again. The practice of contract management analytics should seem as logical as monitoring your nutritional intake and blood pressure to ensure that you are in overall good health.
On a day-to-day basis, your business might feel like it is in good order. But without reviewing real-time contract performance data, you may be unaware of blockages in your company’s circulatory system.
INSTANT ACCESS TO CONTRACT INSIGHTS
In a previous blog post, Manpreet Dhillon, our Head of Legal Transformation, described contract management analytics as “a review of an organization’s agreements to identify and extract pertinent content from contracts.”
Manual contract audits take more person-hours than are reasonably available. So business users and administrators that adopt AI-powered contract management software quickly grow to appreciate the speed and accuracy of contract performance indicators, including:
- Average contract cycle time (ContractPodAi’s PowerBi feature, which will be available in 2020, will enable analytics for this activity)
- Percentage of contracts that are being renewed for given services and subscriptions
- Contracts approved by the eSignature of given executive or customer
- Breakdowns of the quantities of contracts that are set to expire by the fiscal quarter
For businesses with recurring revenue models, such as utilities, law firms, or insurance companies, contract analytical tools are invaluable. The contract insights that they extract from their repository are useful in and of themselves. For businesses with recurring revenue models, contract analytical tools are invaluable. But contract management analytics, enhanced by AI-discovery capability, also enable contract managers to make easy natural language queries without extensive reporting or data science skills.
CONTRACT DATA YOU CAN TRUST FOR DECISION-MAKING
Decades ago, businesses struggled to meet the goals that they set out for themselves whenever they invested in a business intelligence solution. Silos of duplicate, inconsistent, or manipulated departmental data caused many to distrust their reports altogether.
Yet the rise of AI, master data management, and integrated business applications have given executives reason to believe that their contract data is authentic, timely, and decision-worthy. Machine learning enables contract review bots to rapidly process contracts and identify any anomalies that could compromise relationship integrity.
For businesses in sectors like automotive, communications, and technology manufacturing, supply chain efficiency is most critical. Months before a new product launch, many businesses look to their buy-side contract portfolio to evaluate the component suppliers that are able to deliver on time.
Often, retailers and distributors of consumer-packaged goods have suppliers that cannot meet demand. Or they are not able to deliver in-demand merchandise that buyers want. But analytical tools like Contract Pod E: V can help managers to make data-driven decisions on their inventory mix.
BE PREPARED FOR E-DISCOVERY
Courtroom litigation is not a pleasant experience. Sophisticated tools can help you to prepare for it, thus removing the burden from your shoulders. The ability to query your full-contract repository and identify files that relate to particular clients, employees, or other metadata attributes can save your contract managers a great deal of time.
But raw report data does not always tell the whole story. Deep analytics, which only AI-powered contract processing offers, helps to identify trends, non-standard terms, or other irregularities. Especially valuable are audit trails of contract versions and those who interacted with them.)
Also, it helps when an AI engine is trained by legal engineers like those at ContractPodAi. This in-house expertise provides the sort of bias and legal understanding that can protect your interests before, during, and after courtroom proceedings. Or better yet, they can help you avoid going to court at all.
REAL-TIME PERFORMANCE DATA FOR CURRENT AND HISTORICAL CONTRACTS
The ability to query a full contract repository can save your contract manager’s time. Businesses have transformed their contract management processes to digital. But paper contracts continue to be stored away in bankers’ boxes or secure, off-site locations. Perhaps they are even scanned and converted to PDF and profiled with basic metadata.
Nevertheless, capturing and processing all of these files, and running them through an OCR engine can transform these records into invaluable artifacts of corporate memory. Of course, your business standards and processes may change. But at least your users will have visibility into how your business handled situations within a specific window of time.
Many contract analytics tools were developed strictly to:
- Receive a data query from an authorized user via textual input
- Present analysis in an intuitive way, as configured by the user, such as in a pie chart or line graph. ContractPodAi’s PowerBi feature, which will be available in 2020, will enable analytics for this activity.
An “artificial contract analyst” like E: V can do all of that in addition to triggering alerts to your email or mobile device, sending reminders and handling approvals per your company’s business rules. That is because AI-powered process automation can handle the high-volume, menial tasks of contract processing like standard data entry. When circumstances call for human contract analysts to address files that do not meet those “business-as-usual” parameters, their virtual assistant will immediately alert them to the task.
MONITOR YOUR CONTRACTS WITH CUSTOM AND OUT-OF-THE-BOX REPORTS
Your business is unique. Yet many of the contract types and related reports that you work with are similar to those in businesses just like yours. So having a set of pre-configured reports can accelerate your time-to-ROI, helping your business industry leverage best practices. Ultimately, the contract management solution that you choose should be flexible. It should enable you to build dashboards and bespoke reports, etc.
ContractPodAi E: V solution is well-liked by our customers. We laid a solid, yet flexible technological foundation. We purpose-built and trained the AI core of the application upon the insights and experiences of established contract lawyers and experts. As a result, we made the UI so compelling that our founders previously recommended it to colleagues in legal process outsourcing.
We hope that you’ll schedule a demo of ContractPodAi E: V. You’ll see for yourself how our contract repository, workflows, and contract management analytics can empower your in-house legal team to do their best work possible.
Author:
Viraj Chaudhary
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