Contract Lifecycle Management

What is Contract Lifecycle Management?

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The Appian Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution offers an alternative to these often outdated and inefficient workflows.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 enables 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 Contract Lifecycle Management provide?

The Appian Contract Lifecycle Management solution provides a wide range of features that enable your organization to collaborate, update, and execute their contract lifecycle processes. This table describes the solution's key features that differentiate it from other commercial solutions.

CLM use case: Expediting a critical software licensing agreement

To better understand these key features in action, let us examine a detailed use case:

Initech Industries needs to rapidly negotiate and execute a critical software licensing agreement with a key vendor to support their digital transformation initiative. Sarah, a contract manager within Initech's legal department, must manage a complex contract involving multiple stakeholders, technical requirements, and tight deadlines. The traditional contract lifecycle process is known for being lengthy and prone to coordination challenges, often delaying crucial business initiatives.

In this next section, let us explore the CLM features that help Sarah and her colleagues accelerate the contract lifecycle process through this example workflow.

Contract creation and setup

The CLM solution accelerates contract creation and ensures a high level of accuracy and completeness during the contract initiation process. For example, Sarah can quickly create a new contract for Critical Software Licensing Agreement using the guided contract creation wizard. This wizard guides her through entering all necessary contract data, including third party details, contract purpose, and type-specific requirements.

As part of the contract setup, Sarah utilizes the solution's document and template management capabilities to select from pre-approved software licensing templates. The system automatically provides templates specific to the contract type she selected, ensuring consistency with organizational standards and accelerating the contract creation process while maintaining compliance requirements.

CLM provides clause management and standardization capabilities that enable Initech to maintain consistent contractual language across all agreements. The Clause Library enables Sarah to access standardized language and ensure compliance through a central repository of preferred and fallback clauses organized into reusable templates.

Contract drafting and content development

Suppose Sarah encounters a unique contract need where a pre-approved contract template does not apply, and the vendor does not have an appropriate contract template. In that case, Sarah leverages CLM's AI Document Builder to expedite the contract drafting process by quickly generating and refining section content for the software licensing agreement. This AI-led experience saves time and increases efficiency in the contract lifecycle management process.

The dynamic document generation and collaboration capabilities enable her to automatically populate contract templates with information captured in the intake form and collaborate with stakeholders via 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.

The solution's Microsoft 365 integration enables Sarah's team to collaborate on contract documents with real-time change tracking, ensuring all stakeholders can contribute to the contract development while maintaining complete version control and audit trails within the CLM solution.

Additionally, Sarah can use the AI semantic search feature to quickly locate similar software licensing contracts from Initech's contract repository using natural language queries. This capability increases confidence in search results through relevance ratings, helping her identify relevant precedent contracts and clauses to reference during the contract development process, further accelerating her research and decision-making capabilities.

Workflow management and process automation

The no-code workflow management feature ensures contract process compliance, consistency, and efficiency by automatically applying the configured workflow for the contract type when Sarah creates the contract. This feature also supports ad-hoc task creation as unique contract situations arise, enabling Sarah to create and configure additional tasks as needed throughout the contract lifecycle, ensuring all necessary approvals and reviews are completed efficiently without requiring developer assistance.

When Sarah submits the contract for review, the CLM solution automatically applies reusable review processes based on the contract attributes she entered. These review rules with conditional logic automatically assign various tasks to different groups and assignees, such as technical review tasks for the IT team and legal review tasks for the legal department.

Centralized visibility and monitoring

CLM consolidates all relevant data, documents, tasks, communications, and progress for the software licensing agreement into a centralized, accessible view. No more looking across multiple systems to understand the current state of the contract, who is working on what, and what needs to be done next. The optimized homepage and alerts provide real-time visibility for Sarah and all stakeholders, fostering cross-functional collaboration and accountability throughout the contract lifecycle.

Contract execution and signing

Contract Lifecycle Management integrates seamlessly with Docusign to enable Sarah to initiate and manage the entire signing workflow directly within CLM. This integration leverages Docusign's secure and efficient e-signature capabilities while providing real-time visibility into the signing progress through Docusign Connect event updates.

Ongoing contract management and insights

The AI Contract Assistant enables Sarah to quickly obtain key information from contract records by chatting with AI to efficiently stay updated on contract activity and identify next steps without manual review. She can pull information from contracts, third parties, comments, tasks, reviews, and history to address the challenge of keeping track of responsibilities across numerous contracts.

Sarah can also use the AI Contract Assistant to summarize and ask questions about contract documents, helping her quickly identify relevant content within lengthy documents based on specific questions, saving valuable time, and enabling greater focus on critical tasks.

As contracts approach their end date, the solution's contract alert management keeps Sarah ahead of deadlines and minimizes contract risks with customizable alerts that automatically notify assigned stakeholders based on key contract dates. This ensures contracts are renewed on time to avoid costly lapses in service or that automatic renewals are opted out of on time so that services are not unintentionally renewed that are no longer needed.

Furthermore, CLM offers insights and analytics that enable Initech's contract managers and stakeholders to monitor progress, track task completion rates, and manage the team's workloads effectively. This helps identify bottlenecks and optimize resource allocation across multiple contract initiatives.

Since Initech operates globally with offices in the US, UK, and other international markets, Sarah leverages CLM's internationalization capabilities to ensure the contract management process works seamlessly across different regions. The solution comes with built-in localization for ENG-US and ENG-GB, and Initech has easily translated the interface into additional languages using Translation Sets, enabling their international legal teams to collaborate effectively on the software licensing agreement while maintaining consistent processes across all regions.

Integration and efficiency in CLM

This walkthrough of key CLM features demonstrates how Initech drastically reduced their contract lifecycle time, enabling the rapid negotiation and execution of critical software licensing agreements while maintaining thorough compliance standards and audit trails throughout the process.

Get started now

Ready to get started? Check out the following resources:

• Install guide
• Setup guide

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