Remove Risk and Remain Compliant with Contract Management

Review. Negotiate. Sign. Repeat. It seems simple enough, but when each step in the contract management process is handled with paper, email and faxes, it gets awfully difficult to manage. And the consequences in the legal arena aren’t something to sneeze at. If the lifecycle of a contract is handled incorrectly, your organization could lose opportunities for renegotiation, face penalties for non-compliance or go through costly legal audits.

To really have strong control over the contract management process, organizations need to transition to an electronic world. They can do this with OnBase document management.

By putting contracts in a manageable electronic format, all of your documents are stored in a single place. They don’t have to be copied and passed around, they won’t get misfiled or lost on someone’s desk, and everyone is sure to always see the most up-to-date version of the contract.

Simplify Changes and Collaboration

Once documents are in OnBase, whether they are imported from Microsoft Word or scanned in, they are much easier to work with throughout the contract management process. Each edit is fully tracked and recorded, so you have a full history of what was changed, when and who did it. Outdated contracts causing confusion and slowing down processes are a thing of the past.

Here at Hyland, we drink our own Kool-Aid in the legal department. As we grew, the legal team was experiencing the same problems as those in many other organizations. And while we use our own software in every single department in the company, legal is one of the areas where we now use it most extensively.

“Every back and forth iteration of a contract would be saved as a new document with a new name,” states Sherry Odle, manager of contract administration at Hyland. “We had to go through the sent items in Outlook, locate the correspondence containing the correct contract and confirm from the naming conventions and time stamps that all parties were referring to the same iteration of the document. In order to find a specific change, you would have to read the entire contract.”

Now those changes are easily tracked and saved without confusion in OnBase. Completed contracts route through the right approvals automatically and the appropriate approver can use a digital signature to execute the document. 

Add Access and Visibility while Keeping Contracts More Secure

Contracts in OnBase stay secure while still making them easier to access by those who need them. This is done through strong and specific security controls. Groups or individuals can have different levels of access – some may need rights to edit, while others have the ability to read-only, some can print contracts while others may not. OnBase tracks all alterations or actions taken on a contract, and who made the change. This trail of information helps your organization document compliance and reduces the time needed to perform an audit.

Organizations can also take advantage of more visibility into the contract process. With dashboard views of all contract processes, the legal team at Hyland can instantly see the disposition status of any contract. They also use the audit information to pinpoint bottlenecks, identify specific items that can be adjusted and easily forecast resource needs to improve internal and external customer service as well as cycle times.