Remember when we used to have to memorize things to have them accessible to us? Or remember when to do things, like plant seeds, to benefit our lives? Business administration has been progressing in leaps and bounds for millennia, ever since Assyrian kings realized that in order to keep track of how much tax money they were due; they had to have it written down.
When was the last time you saw a business’s receivables printed on a spreadsheet? Why is it obvious that almost every business has sophisticated billing software, yet in so many cases those same businesses’ contracts are managed by crude spreadsheets? The answer is that many have yet to figure understand the real profit, inherent to proper contract management. Two underlying factors are to blame.
Underestimating the negative effect of poor contract management
Not understanding just how much they stand to gain from new, available and affordable technologies
When combined with the fear of “getting involved” with the implementation of new software, many companies choose to ignore this revenue leak until they realize it’s a flood.
In most cases the potential savings in missed deadlines alone, completely outweighs the cost involved in implementing a CMS. Email reminders for contract deadlines, are the most trivial feature of Contract management today. Cloud technology has thrown half of the implementation process out of the window, and a new respect for user experience has made the other half much simpler than one would imagine.
So where is the real difficulty? The answer is the need to accurately describe what it is you want your contract management software to do for you. In CM we no longer ask ourselves whether something can be done. Instead we ask ourselves what is it that we want it to do.
In so many situations we find that prospective users regard the most powerful tools in our platform’s arsenal as ‘nice to haves’ while insisting on making sure we offer email reminders. This clearly demonstrates a lack of understanding of how fundamentally; proper contract management can affect a company’s bottom line.
At openSourceCM we’ve learned that the need to analyze a company’s contract management process and identifying its needs are the two most important steps to adopting a contract management solution. The analysis process usually reveals the weakest areas in the company’s CM process and helps define the company’s needs anew. Gaining an understanding of a prospective user’s contract management process is our first priority after investigating an initial business fit.
The opensourceCM SaaS based solution provides all of the above and much more. It offers a (single sign on) and encrypted secured access. Any folder in the platform can turned into a Negotiation Deal-Rooms available only to users permitted to access it. opensourceCM offers API (Application Processes Interface) connectivity to a wide variety of applications such as BOX.COM, SalesForce, MS-Dynamics, NetSuite, OKTA, QuickBooks, Zoho CRM, Dropbox, DocuSign to mention just a few.
Tags: Knowledge Base