Contract Management Six Sigma Process Improvement In Legal Services

Six Sigma in Legal Processes

ConvergePoint Contract Management Software is an easy-to-use and effective tool that allows an organization to implement these methodologies to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and deliver added value to clients.

Understanding Six Sigma and Process Improvement in Legal Services

Many have heard the term Six Sigma. Yet many are not exactly sure what it means. In some organizations, Six Sigma is merely used as a term to indicate the measure of quality with the ultimate goal of perfection. Six Sigma is actually defined as “a disciplined, data-driven approach and methodology for eliminating defects (driving toward six standard deviations between the mean and the nearest specification limit) in any process.” This quality improvement process can be applied in almost any type of organization and has been used in manufacturing, professional, and service industries.

“Lean Six Sigma” is a tool used by businesses to streamline their manufacturing and production processes. The primary goal of Lean Six Sigma is to eliminate unnecessary and wasteful steps in a process to ensure that only the steps that directly add value to the product are considered. In the Lean methodology, to determine the value of a step or component is to think about whether a customer would be willing to pay for it. Anything in the process that fails to add value is to be removed. This will result in an extremely streamlined and profitable process that will flow smoothly and efficiently.

Although Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma strive for the same objective, they have separate approaches as to how to achieve this goal. Simply put, they determine the root cause of waste in different ways. Lean says that waste is derived from unneeded steps in the process that do not add value, while Six Sigma proposes that waste is the result of variations within the process.

There’s a growing trend in corporate law departments and in law firms to implement Lean Six Sigma as a means of continuously improving the way these professionals deliver their services beyond the traditional cost control approaches. ConvergePoint Contract Management Software is an easy-to-use and effective tool that allows an organization to implement these methodologies to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and deliver added value to clients.

By effectively managing the contract lifecycle in your organization, legal departments and other professional organizations are uncovering these unneeded steps in the contract management process that do not add value. For example, the Contract Request Management allows your organization to:

• Implement the solution quickly with seamless migration and customizable features;
• Keep all relevant data in one central repository to avoid fruitless searching for key information;
• Track and prioritize projects based on common and agreed upon criteria;
• Create custom workflows to improve individual team member productivity;
• Eliminate reliance on email conversations, Excel spreadsheets, share drives, and shared folders;
• Coordinate the approval process with a multi-tiered approval process that eliminates unneeded review; and
• Clearly define roles and responsibilities to eliminate redundancies and extra effort.

When everyone in business is expected to make greater contributions to the bottom line and to do more with less, implementing a tool that creates an environment of process improvement and increased efficiency is critical to getting ahead in today’s market.