Contract Lifecycle Management Overview

Introduction

A reliance on siloed tools, like Word and email, or custom legacy systems, often results in a drawn-out, opaque contract lifecycle management process that increases the risk of organizations violating various legal requirements. These bottlenecks and compliance issues lead to lengthier, more expensive contract lifecycles, and ultimately, lost revenue.

The Appian Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution offers an alternative to these often outdated and inefficient workflows. The CLM solution automates and streamlines the key processes and decision points during each stage of the contract lifecycle, creating a more transparent, efficient, and profitable way for organizations to deliver on the contractual needs of their business.

CLM allows organizations to manage each stage of the contract lifecycle, from authoring and negotiation, to approval and execution. After the contract has been signed, CLM also provides key monitoring and reporting activities related to renewals, amendments, and contract expiration.

This page provides a quick overview of all the benefits of CLM and what it has to offer.

What does Appian CLM provide?

CLM offers a flexible and dynamic alternative to managing the complex and time-consuming processes in the lifecycle of a contract.

With more control and visibility into key tasks and decision points during the cycle, you can decrease the initiation-to-signature timeline and increase the efficiency and profitability of your contract lifecycle management activities.

The CLM solution is built to help every type of user that is part of your contract lifecycle management process, from the contract owners who initiate a contract request, to the contract workers who manage and review the contracts, to the third party vendors and partners who sign the contract. Each user can benefit from the next-level user experience, streamlined contract management process, intuitive design, highly configurable setup and management, and dynamic workflows.

Guided Contract Creation Wizard

CLM provides a contract creation wizard to help guide contract workers through the contract creation process. This guided experience allows users to create contracts using a hybrid intake form with a uniform first page and configurable subsequent pages based on the contract type. Users can define contract details like third party, purpose, and type.

Contract workers can also use the contract creation wizard to create a contract from an internal template or third-party paper.

AI Document Builder

The CLM solution leverages the power of generative AI to help expedite the contract drafting process. Users can draft unique contract documents through an AI-assisted experience.

With AI at their fingertips, contract workers are able to quickly generate and refine the section content for their contracts, saving time and increasing efficiency in the contract lifecycle management process.

AI Contract Assistant

The AI Contract Assistant enables you to quickly obtain key information from contract records by chatting with AI to efficiently stay updated on contract activity and identify the next steps without manual review. You can pull information from contracts, third parties, comments, tasks, reviews, history, signatories, status, and contract type records to address the challenge contract owners and legal personnel face in keeping track of responsibilities across numerous contracts, enabling them to efficiently stay updated.

CLM also leverages AI to allow users to summarize and ask questions about contract documents in the application. The AI Contract Assistant helps users quickly identify relevant contract documents and content within those documents based on their questions.

Rather than reviewing lengthy documents line by line, users can efficiently locate the information they need. This saves valuable time, minimizes bottlenecks, and enables greater focus on critical tasks.

AI semantic search

CLM enables you to use natural language to search for and identify relevant contract records. This makes it easier to locate contracts and increases confidence in search results through relevance ratings.

Integration with Docusign

The CLM solution features seamless integration with Docusign eSignature, streamlining the contract signing process. Initiate and manage the entire signing workflow directly within CLM, leveraging Docusign's secure and efficient e-signature capabilities. Docusign Connect seamlessly relays event updates back to CLM, providing real-time visibility into the signing progress.

This powerful integration empowers you to create and embed tasks that trigger the signing process through Docusign in your contract workflows, clearly define and manage contract signatories, and automatically retrieve and securely store fully executed contracts within the contract record.

Document and template management

Template management in CLM allows privileged business users to easily create contract templates for specific contract types, build contracts from those existing templates, and configure additional attributes for a created contract type.

Since initiating a new contract typically involves using an existing contract template as the starting point, this makes it quick and easy for contract workers to create, manage, and leverage templates within the solution to streamline the contract creation process in alignment with their contract needs.

Each template can be assigned to a specific contract type so that contract workers are automatically provided with a list of templates for the contract type they select. CLM also makes it easy to keep templates up to date with the latest terms while retaining access to previous template versions.

No-code workflow management

Control Panel in CLM enables privileged business users to create reusable tasks and task blocks to improve operational consistency, compliance, and efficiency throughout the contract lifecycle.

Privileged business users can also use Control Panel to define custom data elements, intake forms, workflows, and summary views without the need for developers or access to Appian Designer.

Reusable review processes

Define reusable review rules with conditional logic that are automatically suggested based on matching contract attributes and can be further modified to meet the needs of each contract.

Optimized homepage and alerts

The Workspace page offers a user-centric interface design that allows contract workers to optimize contract throughput and reduce lapses and expirations.

Dynamic document generation and collaboration

Automatically populate contract placeholders with information captured in the contract intake form and collaborate via CLM's Microsoft 365 integration. Contract management personnel can easily track changes and collaborate on the same contract document while maintaining an up to date version history in the CLM solution.

Insights and analytics

With CLM you can build actionable, individualized reports and dashboards with Data Fabric insights and analyze process execution with Process Insights.

Internationalization

CLM comes with internationalization and localization for ENG-US and ENG-GB right out of the box. You can also easily translate the CLM solution into other languages using Translation Sets.

Configure contract alerts

Stay ahead of deadlines and minimize contract risks with customizable alerts. CLM automatically notifies assigned stakeholders and allows you to include additional teams or individuals. Define alerts precisely based on key contract dates.

Get started now

Ready to get started? Check out the following resources:

• Install guide
• Setup guide

Feedback