Sometimes when organizations lack a specific capability, they end up not being able to undertake fundamental contract management tasks. This fact became clear to me during meetings I had with several GC's in a variety of companies, all did not have an access-rights management protocol in place.
Not being able to tightly control who does, and does not see your company's contracts creates severe restrictions on the company's ability to manage its contracts dynamically, and proactively. In the case at hand, the most immediate result of not having access management rights was that anyone involved with the contract management process had full access to all of the company's contracts, and their related meta-data. As a result, different types of the company's contract's, such as HR contracts ended up being handled in a completely separate process to shield them from the eyes of company employees. Contracts under negotiation needed to be concealed, and were in effect managed by different people, and any collaboration with people outside the organization such as attorneys, involved printing and mailing copies.
The adverse effects of additional man hours, wasted process time, delays, and endless printing, pale in comparison to those stemming from not having a flexible, single repository system, running on a standardized data-set. opensourceCM offers access rights controls that are so flexible, that you can create rules that apply to an entire organization, or to a specific person or file. The rules determine what a person can see or not see, as well as what they can do or not do with files that they do have access to.
An organization that maintains all of its contracts in a single digital repository, running on a standardized data-set, gains a wide perspective of is assets and liabilities. being able to manage those contracts within an organization while maintaining strict access rights ensures there are no multiple file versions 'floating' around, and no room for confusion. Outside users can be granted special read only access for collaborations, and inside users see only what they need to see, and do only what they are required to do.
The setup of these access rights is the real task and we support our users digging into it. Once running, you won't be able to work without it.
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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