Why Innovative Businesses Automate Their Contracts

No matter how you prioritize projects within your organization, administrative tasks always seem to get the best of your time and energy. For operations professionals like you, business contracts have become an honorary curse word and are likely the most frustrating part of your job. But because of their increasing volume, risk, and potential, contracts are also the most important unsolved problem in modern business. 

Legal teams are so underwater with contracts that they slow down the rest of the business, which means all future success hinges on the efficiency of your organization’s contract management system. This is why getting a handle on your contracts will help drive administrative efficiencies across your entire business, and it’s a change that can originate right within the operations team. 

With the amount of approvals and contracts your company processes on a daily basis, it’s probably no secret that your legal team is viewed as a bottleneck. While these delays cause a chain reaction of hold-ups across the business, there are even bigger problems at play: As a trusted operations team member, you’re unable to get a clear view of exactly where your contracts stand and missing crucial contract data needed to determine the health of your business. 

So it’s not just the legal team that’s a bottleneck—It’s your contract management system, and it’s minimizing the success of everyone across your organization. 

The reasoning behind the inefficient and unscalable contract processes in your organization probably comes down to mitigating risk and following compliance standards. While every other process has become digitized and improved with technology, contracts have been left behind out of fear. The good news is that it doesn’t have to stay this way. 

Ironclad’s contract lifecycle management platform was created to make contract management inefficiencies a thing of the past. With everything you need to create automated, self-service contracts without compromising risk management or compliance, you’ll feel confident automating contracts through templatable workflows, creating one source of truth for all of your contract needs. 

As someone on the operations team, you understand the importance of unlocking the contracting problem not just for your legal team, but for the entire organization. With Ironclad, you’ll be able to measure and use contract data like never before, helping you to understand where your business is most successful and identify new opportunities. 

But using Ironclad will also help your peers across the organization, like members of the procurement team as they drive efficiency and negotiation, the finance department as they stop revenue leakage and minimize risk, and the sales team as they find new revenue opportunities within your contracts. 

One of the most frequently used types of contracts within companies of all sizes is a third-party vendor contract. Used to establish an agreement between your organization and an external party, this document sets the tone for your business relationship and is extremely important to get right on the first draft. 

But that doesn’t mean this type of contract has to take up all of your time. In fact, third-party vendor agreements are the “low-hanging fruit” that lend themselves perfectly to a contract workflow that will automate the process. . In other words, they are simple contract processes that can easily be mechanized, leaving your team with the bandwidth to work on more complicated and high-risk projects. 

The ideal solution is to enable anyone who touches business contracts to become self-sufficient in the process and not held up by factors they can’t control. By empowering them with digital contracting technology and training teams to collaborate cross-functionally, you’ll automate routine contracts and leave more bandwidth for higher-risk contracts that need your attention. 

Digital contracting gives you an end-to-end platform that sees contracts through their entire lifecycle. It helps you set the appropriate guardrails for a specific contract, like third-party vendor agreements, so that you can automate them while still knowing they are compliant and effective.

Managing your contracts digitally will enable your business to be more efficient than ever before while also gaining valuable data that will help you continue to refine the process. Digital contracting platforms allow you to streamline collaboration and negotiation, as well as manage the contract redlining and revision process in one place. After the contract has been signed, you can store it for future reference and to help you reduce risk and uncover new opportunities. 

Because overworked legal teams and lack of collaboration across the business has become the norm, finding a better way is the ultimate opportunity for you to become a better cross-functional business partner. With solutions every department will love, Ironclad helps you solve the contract management problem process by: 

• Creating one single source of truth and one go-to place for your contracts
• Being an end-to-end system that manages every step of the contract lifecycle
• Hosting internal and external collaboration within the platform
• Unlocking data within your contracts, helping you to become more efficient and uncover new opportunities 
• Enabling templatable workflows for each contract type
• Streamlining the process for all departments without losing contract flexibility 

By implementing contract lifecycle management software, your third-party vendor contracts  can go from deal breakers to deal makers. To see how Ironclad can solve your organization’s contract management process problems, click here to learn more about digital contracting.