Appian Contract Writing Overview

Introduction

The Appian Contract Writing solution provides a single application that allows you to streamline your procurement writing process. Its flexible and configurable architecture makes it easy to configure the solution, and tailor it to meet the needs of your organization’s unique contract writing needs.

With CW, your contracting professionals can create contract documents, capture key line item details, enter custom contract text, and manage the contract file. It provides a comprehensive view of the solicitations and awards created by your organization, which improves visibility and allows you to keep your procurements on track. The best news is it can be ready to deploy within weeks.

This page provides a quick overview of all the benefits of Appian Contract Writing and what it has to offer. Want to know more about using the Contract Writing solution? Check out the topics in Using Contract Writing starting with the Quick Start User Guide.

What does Appian Contract Writing provide?

Guided data collection

A helpful form wizard guides you and your end users through an efficient data entry process for your contracts, which reduces time and helps ensure data accuracy in your contract documents.

Configurable workflows and reviews

Create checklists, workflows, and reviews that will automatically assign tasks to groups or individuals based on the contract data. Our task management suite allows users to easily add, edit, rearrange, or reassign your tasks as needed.

Full transparency with a single view

Combine disparate data from legacy processes, different sources, and checklists into a single application to enable collaboration within your organization. Break down barriers in your procurement process and clarify the status of your procurements through solicitation and award summaries, task visibility, and procurement progress indicators.

Comprehensive document management

Create, manage, and collaborate on your contract documents and templates directly in the application. Capture key details, automate clause set creation, and take advantage of our rich text editor to craft your contract documents with ease.

Generative AI capabilities

Boost your writing efficiency by leveraging AI to kickstart a draft or make quick updates to your contract text, all with you in control of the final output.

Procurement AI Copilot

Easily navigate the complexities of government contract writing with your own personal knowledge assistant. The Procurement AI Copilot module integrates with Appian’s Contract Writing solutions to help streamline the procurement process. Quickly access relevant knowledge, increase compliance, and increase decision-making efficiency.

On the Contract File tab, you can ask the AI Document Assistant to summarize the document's contents or ask specific questions about the document and receive AI-generated answers and insights.

Procurement Analytics integration

Contract Writing also integrates with Procurement Analytics to enable acquisition-related reporting, helping you get the most from your available award data. Common reports include Category Spend (against budget), Socioeconomic Spend (against budget), Fiscal Year Obligated Spend, Vendor Spend, PSC Spend, and reporting to show the current lifecycle status of all Awards.

See Installing Procurement Analytics to get started.

Other Transaction Agreements (OTs)

Track and manage special contractual agreements between government agencies and non-traditional contractors known as OTs. Because these agreements have different rules and requirements than FAR-based contracts, they typically vary in structure from agency to agency and need to be managed differently than traditional government contracts. The Contract Writing solution, with its wide range of capabilities, allows you to create and manage OTs according to your organization's unique requirements with maximum flexibility and speed.

Integration with Government Source Selection

Contract Writing (CW) comes with an integration with Government Source Selection (GSS) that allows data to flow between the two solutions, streamlining the process of creating an evaluation from a solicitation.

The Solicitation Summary view provides an entry point into GSS from CW, and the ability to create a new evaluation that is pre-populated with data from a solicitation reduces the need to rekey overlapping information in each solution.

As long as you have both solutions in the same environment, the integration will be set up automatically.

Intelligent Code Search

Use efficient and intelligent capabilities to quickly find the data you need. Our intelligent code search easily identifies Product Service Codes (PSC) and recommends related NAICS codes to save you time.

Contract Writing Navigation

The application consists of two main work spaces that are made up of two different sites: the Contract Writing Site and the Contract Writing Settings Site.

Contract Writing Site

The Contracting Writing site allows users to:

• Create, update, and amend a solicitation: Enter in all the solicitation data needed through a guided experience. Use the intelligent search capabilities to find contacts, addresses, and Product Service Codes (PSC) and NAICS codes to reduce errors when creating new solicitations. Easily track and maintain all line item data and documents and create amendments for your solicitation.
• Create, update, and modify an award (contract): Use a guided experience to enter all the award data or manually create the award from your solicitation by copying the data to your award. Use the intelligent search capabilities for contact, addresses, and Product Service Codes (PSC) and NAICS codes to reduce errors when creating the award. Easily track and maintain all your award line item data and documents. Easily create modifications for your award.
• Create, configure, and complete checklist items: Checklists are a collection of assignable tasks. Each checklist is completely configurable with the ability to add, edit, or sequence checklist tasks as needed. Users are notified by email when a new task is assigned and will also receive follow-up notifications when tasks are due, overdue, re-assigned to a new user or when the due date is modified.
• Maintain visibility into the state of solicitations and awards: Our solution provides a centralized location to view all of your solicitation and award data, documents, status, and history. This includes both original and conformed documentation. Agencies can also grant view-only access to non-contracting department personnel to get insights into solicitation or award details, tasks, status, and progress to completion.

See Contract Writing Quick Start Guide for an overview of the most common views and actions you will use to manage your procurement workflows.

Settings Site

The Contract Writing Settings site allows business users to manage solicitation and award checklists and review processes, including managing categories, tasks, and checklists.

From the front end of the application, the Contract Writing Settings site allows business users to:

• Manage Categories: Categories group checklist items together, usually by the function of the item or the group that performs the checklist items. Business users can update these categories as their needs change.
• Manage a library of tasks: You can create a library of tasks that make it easy to add items to templates and individual requirement checklists.
• Keep checklists up to date: Realizing that users are always marking a task as not needed? Remove the task. Have a new requirement checklist type? Create a new checklist. Your requirement checklists can be as flexible as you need them to be.

• Manage document and solicitation/award review processes: Review process is a grouping of all the user groups that need to review the document, solicitation, or award. You can create a library of processes based on document template, threshold amounts, or solicitation method.

  

Get started now

Ready to get started? Check out Installing Contract Writing, then additional content covered in the Contract Writing documentation.

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