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Contract Management

Contract management resources, articles, guides and how-tos can help you improve efficiency.

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Contract Management System – 3 Reasons Your Sales Department Has Declared War

Interactions with prospects and customers are traditionally regarded as the ‘front line’ of business operations. Making sales to those customers follows the same warfare analogy of fighting ‘in the trenches’, clawing for every inch of ground against increasingly aggressive competition for customer dollars.

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Contract Management – 3 Ways to Speed Up Contract Approvals

Creating and managing contracts requires a coordinated team of individuals to funnel each document through every phase. Depending on your timeline, your team may spend months organizing every party, negotiating any terms, and finally approving the contract.

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4 Benefits of Integrating Buy- Sell-Sides of Contracts

Often, the buy-side of contract managementsits at the opposite end of the spectrum — and the opposite end of the office — from the sell-side of contract management. Some companies have a greater need for buy-side versus sell-side, or vice versa, and often, companies choose to focus on one over the other, meaning the goals for each side are very different.

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5 Quick Business Intelligence Tips For Contract Management

Increases in technology, reporting analytics, and business intelligence have revolutionized the way business leaders approach every business process including, Contract Management. However, many business leaders are still left in the dark about how ;Contract Lifecycle

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5 Contract Management Review Checklist

Whether the contract has just been drafted and is going through initial review, or the contract has been approved and is ready to be signed and executed, does your legal team have a process in place for reviewing a contract?

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5 hidden benefits of contract management software

All contract management software vendors talk about the features of the system — the nuts and bolts — and how these features translate to benefits for your legal team. Automating the contract workflow saves your legal time and resources, prevents your team from missing a contractual.

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5 Mistakes Your Organization Makes When Managing Contracts

Within the modern business model, the complexity of contracts, contract terms and contract conditions is growing. The number of contracts requiring proper management is also increasing. Managing contracts manually is a huge burden on an organization and can result in higher risk and costs.

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5 ways to avoid contract management nightmares by leveraging microsoft office 365

On a day-to-day basis, your legal team manages all aspects in relation to your company’s contracts. With so many moving parts in your fast-growing organization, managing these contracts can become a nightmare if you are not equipped with the right tools. Keeping track of who is joining

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5 Ways to Create Legal Team Cohesion with Contract Management

The performance of legal teams is directly affected by their level of cohesion. Just like any team, disturbances

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6 Ways an Ineffective Contract Renewal Process Hurts Your Roi

You’ve probably seen firsthand how mismanagement, errors and delays in the contract renewal process can affect your bottom line.

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7 Things that will Change the Way you Approach Contract Management

Is your team managing all incoming contract requests in a streamlined manner? Are people within your organization asking your legal team to work on contracts even before a budget has been approved for the project? Are you having a tough time tracking all of the requests

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7 Tips For Better Contract Management

Managing hundreds and thousands of contracts can be a difficult task. Contract lifecycle management best practices like these 7 tips we have put together can help eliminate bottlenecks and increase, as well as recognize, revenue.

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8 Benefits of Contract Management Sharepoint Systems

Find out more about ConvergePoint SharePoint Contract Management Software Contract Management Software Overview

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Are Your Contract Management Processes Outdated?

On a daily basis, it’s easy to get comfortable with the current business processes running within your organization. After all, your business may have operated this way for a number of years and your processes don’t necessarily need constant updates to be successful.

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Beyond the Dollar Amount: Evaluating a Contract’s Value to Your Business

How much is the contract worth? How much value does your business gain from that contract? Most importantly, are those two numbers the same or similar? A contract doesn’t just outline the negotiated details between you and a vendor; the contract details and fulfillment of the

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Close the Deal Faster with Robust Contract Lifecycle Management

Your sales team works hard to provide a smooth customer journey that starts with a potential client’s desire for a product or service and then transitions to brand awareness, contract negotiation, and hopefully a sale. The journey can go a lot smoother if a contract lifecycle management (CLM)

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Avoid these Common Contract Management Pitfalls to Improve Efficiency & Reduce Risk

Compliance professionals who manage contracts know how important it is to produce flawless documents. No two contracts are ever alike; they each have their own codicils and clauses and important terms that might have required months of negotiations. Nothing less than complete

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Common Construction Contract Management Issues in the U.S.

Construction is a beast of an industry–high-risk, hazardous, and highly competitive. Relying on contractor and sub-contractor inputs is a challenge, but add safety and health to the equation and it makes the load even tougher for any construction professional.

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Contract Lifecycle Management: Who are the Key Players?

Efficient contract lifecycle management is gaining importance as we move to a service-based society where the rules of our offerings are outlined in the contracts we negotiate with one another. Contracts legally bind us to our obligations while detailing what those obligations are.

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Contract Management – Are You Missing Critical Contract Elements?

Nothing happens in business until somebody buys something. The old adage is as true today as it has ever been. Increasing global competition presents your prospects with a dazzling array of options, and it doesn’t matter whether you try to compete on product, price, promotion

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Best Practices in Contract Management (and in general)

We can all learn lessons from others. In business, there are thousands of books sold by corporate leaders to Olympic athletes explaining how to be better leaders and executives, how to communicate more effectively, and how to create more custom-centric work environments.

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Guide: Mid-term Contract Review: 6 Essential Tips

Many times it’s what a party does beyond providing the service or goods agreed to in the contract that makes a renewal a successful non-event. Adding value to this relationship is a critical part of growing a relationship with a client to make them satisfied and to retain them as long-time customers.

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Contract Management – Preparing for Contract Negotiation

When preparing to negotiate a new contract or a contract renewal, organization will be your strongest asset. Having access to all key information in a contract, understanding of the requesting department’s needs and notes, and in the event of a renewal, historical evidence of compliance with the agreement

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Contract Management Processes – 3 Myths Debunked

For a number of years, businesses around the globe have integrated various contract management processes to get a better grasp of their contract lifecycle. These businesses quickly found the benefits of having some sort of contract management platform, inspiring new organizations to look for contract management

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Contract Management Processes – Aligning With Your Procurement Department

The complex relationship between contract managers and their procurement counterparts features a core value expressed by both parties: improving business results. Contract managers are in charge of handling all of the contracts in an organization and effectively managing their full lifecycle. Meanwhile,

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Contract Management Simplified: Are Contract Renewals Costing You More Than They Should?

Whenever professionals agree with signing a contract, a very important aspect of the contract is its renewal status. Every contract is slightly different, including whether or not contract renewals are automatic. This becomes problematic as organizations typically have hundreds if not thousands of agreements

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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

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Don’t Let Outdated Contract Management Processes Derail Your Supply Chain

Globalization and the advent of online shopping have made the transportation and logistics industry a booming business worth trillions of dollars. Despite a hard-to-predict future with a looming recession, union-worker strikes, trade wars, and potential tariffs on imports shaking things up, service providers are still prioritizing

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Contract Management – The Downside of Auto-Renewals

If your contracts department suffers from a checkered past and an under-resourced or disorganized present, the prospect of auto-renewed contracts can seem like an answer to your prayers. If each contract renewal represents a scramble to find the original paperwork, verify that all performance criteria have been met,

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Contract Managers Face Tough Balancing Act

The contract manager’s job description, status and responsibilities vary from company to company, but the position is a necessary and critical part of any organization. They’re often required to have a legal background so they can draft, negotiate and execute contracts, as well as have enough

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Contract Templates – Making Contract Managers’ Lives Simple or Difficult?

To succeed in their roles, contract administrators and managers must have a meticulous eye — making sure every ‘t’ is crossed, every ‘i’ is dotted, documents are formatted consistently and all contracts are written as precisely as possible.

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Design a Better System for Contractual Obligations and Renewals

A couple of weeks ago, we provided guidelines and questions to ask your legal team to help you evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the contract creation (contract requests, creation, review, approval and execution) side of your current processes. What happens once the contract has been executed

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Develop Contract Processes that Encourage Delegation

The National Contract Management Association defines micro-managing as “a management style in which a supervisor closely observes or controls the work of an employee” in its 2007 article, “The Consequences of Micromanaging.” No matter what your role in the company, whether entry-level employee

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Don’t Forget: 5 Tips on How to Evaluate Renewing Contracts

A main selling point of contract management systems is that they send contract managers automated reminders when a contract is due to renew, expire or needs renegotiating. You recognize that letting uneconomical contracts auto-renew is costly, and know that they need review, but what’s the next step?

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Thank You – Download the Free Contract Management eBook

ConvergePoint Enterprise Contract Management System, built on Microsoft SharePoint (available on Microsoft SharePoint 2016, Microsoft SharePoint 2013, Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Office 365 – SharePoint Online), automates the contract management process, ensuring

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Download the Free convergePoint Structured Contract Request Form

The ConvergePoint Structured Contract Request Form is a Microsoft Word Macro-Enabled fillable-form that incorporates the best practices for structuring contract requests, so your employees don’t leave out the crucial details your legal team needs.

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Download the White Paper: Achieving Efficient Contract Management on Microsoft SharePoint

Download this white paper, which outlines the benefits of an efficient contract management system: The longevity and profitability of your business are determined by how well you negotiate, fulfill, manage, evaluate and renegotiate contracts with customers and partners

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Good Contract Management saves Time and Money

How do your paralegals and legal administrators spend the majority of their day? Do they go on wild goose chases looking for contract information? Are they worried about missing emailed contract approvals or contracts that have mysteriously fallen off the priority list?

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How to Evaluate Contract Management Systems from an IT Perspective

As an IT project manager or SharePoint administrator with your own job tasks and processes, it can be a challenge to evaluate software vendors based on the needs and from the standpoint of another department, especially without knowledge of their processes and goals.

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Contract Management – Identifying Process Improvement In The Organization

“Process improvement” means to make things better. The best way to improve the contract management process is to identify the root cause of an issue and think of ways to correct it. This may not be an easy fix. Most of the time process improvement involves analysis of why events occur with a certain result.

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Implement a Contract Lifecycle Management Solution (Never Miss a Deadline Again)

When it comes to automatic renewal clauses in contracts, complacency can be the quickest route to financial loss. Often, a significant amount of diligence is required to ensure no deadlines are missed in the contract review process. However, without a contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution in place

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How to Increase Productivity Improve any CLM Program

When you think about all the things that eat up your productivity at work, do you find that you are wasting a lot of time on contract-management tasks? When you are responsible for hundreds or even thousands of contracts, it becomes critical that you manage your time as wisely as possible.

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Construction Companies can go Lean with Contract Management

The construction industry is built on business partnerships — nurturing your customers and vendors, as well as defining how your relationship will work in the form of contracts. Contracts with vendors, subcontracts, architecture firms and other partners are key documents that all contractors must deal with on a daily basis.

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Quick Tips to Evaluate Contract Processes: Requests, Creation, Review

Whether you’re looking to overhaul or refine current contract processes, start at the beginning — with contract requests. Often, legal departments’ inefficiency stems from juggling and prioritizing the volume of requests, which come to them via email, phone calls, handwritten notes and comments made in passing.

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Recent Oversights in Government Contract Management Prove Costly

Recently, audits of local and state government agencies — in California, Massachusetts, Texas and elsewhere — have revealed costly oversights in their contract management processes: Entering into contracts with entities that have ties to agency staff, resulting in conflicts of interest and thus contract abuse

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Checklist: Risk Assessment when Managing Contracts

Risk assessment is an integral part of risk management, especially when managing contracts. With our Risk Assessment checklist, you’ll be able to:

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The Road Map to Success with Better Contract Management

From start to finish, the entire Contract Management life cycle is a lot like the all-American, family road trip. Although nowadays, actual road maps have been replaced with cell phones, GPS systems, and built-in navigation systems, there is still something quintessential about the old crinkled up, hand-held map.

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Role and Importance of Contract Managers Increases

Without committed, experienced contract managers, it’s virtually impossible to have an efficient contract management system, whether your organization relies on Contract Management Software or not.

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Are You SMART About Your Contract Management?

Ask this question to any paralegal, attorney, or member of an in-house legal team, and you will be surprised at the variety of responses. I’ve gotten the full spectrum, “We don’t effectively manage our contracts, I am calling you because we’re inadvertently renewing contracts and I keep missing important dates.

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Stay Away from these Contract Renewal Methods

When the ink dries on a brand new contract, legal and compliance teams rejoice that the lengthy process is over. During the creation, negotiation, review and approval stages, a lot of hard work and resources making each contract come to life. Eventually, these contracts are set to be renewed, requiring immediate action to make sure these contracts remain updated and that all verbiage remains appropriate.

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Taking the Confusion Out of Contract Renewal

Perhaps the most common challenge organizations face in the management of their contracts is the process of the contract renewal. While the focus of the renewal process is often placed on tracking the appropriate renewal date, an aspect that is often overlooked is the renewal type.

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The Cost of Non-compliance Series: Penalties in Manual Contract Management

In our Cost of Non-Compliance Series, we have been discussing the four major costs associated with non-compliance. The first week we discussed Resources, this week we are discussing Penalties. When it comes to Contract Management, here are the costs associated with non-compliance penalties.

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The Quickest Route to the Fastest Contract Lifecycle Management Implementation

It never gets less exciting when a new client comes on board. Clients are eager to get started playing with their new contract management system, and our IT support team can’t wait to show them all the tools, tips and tricks to using the software.

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Under Strict Financial Regulations? Protecting Contract Data can be Shockingly Easy

Banking and financial institutions, perhaps more than any other type of business, must be constantly on alert for cybersecurity breaches. Their customers entrust them with a large amount of data, and financial firms’ business depends on the ability to protect and secure their customers’ information.

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What We can Learn from Contract Management Innovation Award Winners

The first step to contract management operational excellence is taking a step back to access the current process and determine where there are gaps and if and where there is room for improvement. The 2015 Operational Improvement Innovation Award winning organization evaluated the status

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Where’s the Weakest Link in Your Contract Management Process Chain?

Effective contract management is a critical component of your business infrastructure. Everything your sales and marketing people have promised can be undone with a simple clerical error. Even if the product or service exceeds customer expectations, the overall customer experience

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Why SharePoint is a Perfect Tool for Contract Management?

Your organization has made a significant investment in SharePoint. Making the most out of your organization’s SharePoint IT ecosystem can be highly useful when it comes to managing your contract management processes. Although SharePoint provides some functionality in dealing with contract management,

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Why Version Control is Critical for Contract Management

Take a look at how your company’s contracts are organized and how your team communicates when working on those contracts.

Looking for best practices?

Visit our resource library for industry best practice tips and for case studies on how our software has helped clients in your industry.