Does a Multi-million Dollar Company Need Contract Life-Cycle Management?

The business world is changing rapidly. Innovate, adapt or die. Obsolete yourself before your competitor does it for you. These are accepted precepts that typify the dizzying pace with which companies must respond to competitive and market pressures. It’s not slowing down and it won’t. It’s accelerating. Margins are being squeezed. Customers are demanding faster and faster delivery times, with higher quality and reduced requirements to hold inventory. It can be difficult to maintain market share, never mind grow it. The simple fact of the matter is that businesses aren’t allowed to make many mistakes. Too many and you’re circling the drain. Increasingly, success is defined by our ability to reliably and quickly access, retrieve, process, analyze and respond to data. We’re in the data age. He who manages his data the best and who can respond to what it tells him the most quickly, will likely be the winner over the long haul.

So, as the owner of a company generating $10 million annually selling components, why do you need a full life cycle contract management system? Well, first of all, if you only have 5 customers and 5 contracts, each worth $2 million you don’t need one. So I won’t take any more of your time. Oh, you still need help from an income diversification perspective, but that is a topic for another time. So let’s say you have 400 contracts each worth $25,000 on average, and twice as many supporting documents related in some way to the contracts. So you have 1200 documents you need to track in some way, shape or form. How are you doing that? Do you have legacy paper and MS Word and PDF files? Are they kept in a central place or stored across hell’s half acre? Are they located in functional silos or with the individual responsible for executing them? Perhaps you don’t know where all of them are located. And realizing the impact of recent unanticipated suppler delays, does Jane, the contract administrator, go into cardiac arrest, knowing she will be in the office until after midnight searching for the language that you remember was in 6-8 large contracts that could expose you to $90,000 in penalties. And that’s just the exposure this month.

opensourceCM is a cloud-based SaaS (software-as-a-service) solution. When uploading a text or MS Excel document the application performs OCR, indexing and then recreates each document as an HTML document allowing easy document comparisons (e.g., between MS Word and scanned PDF docs). It also provides the ability to find words, values, phrases, terms of art or specific legal language within documents that are hyperlinked to the actual highlighted location in each document. This can be accomplished across document data sets that may comprise tens of thousands of documents.Furthermore, opensourceCM provides a contract authoring workflow, calendar and notifications workflow, support SSO (single sign on) and encrypted secured access. The application offers the ability to simply create Negotiation Deal-Rooms and Users Data-Rooms (internal/External) or Flexible Bidding System with Advance Q&A. We offer an API (Application Processes Interface) Library with office365, BOX.COM, SalesForce, MS-Dynamics, NetSuite, OKTA, Dropbox, DocuSign to mention just a few.

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