Your Contract Management Knowledge Center

Jana Wiggins

Recent Posts

Health Services NPO Cuts Contract Turnaround and Aces Audits With DMS

It is the purpose of many nonprofits and NGOs to take action in resolving global health issues and, to establish and provide resources to struggling people who have nowhere to turn. Their mission is to educate, inform, and strength healthcare workers and systems.

Providing these resources is the first step in their mission. Their challenge is to provide these resources in the most effective and efficient way possible.

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Document Management System Contract Management Saves NPO Thousands

As a nonprofit product development partnership (PDP), TB Alliance collaborates with many external partners globally in their quest to discover and develop better, faster-acting, and affordable drugs to fight tuberculosis.

In support of their contractual collaborations, they originally used a SaaS NGO/NPO contract management system competitor, but glitches, more cumbersome system features than actual benefits, and poor customer service left them in need of a new document management platform. Since choosing DocuVantage one year ago, they haven’t looked back.

Click here to read the case study and learn how TB Alliance integrated document management for a reliable and customizable contracts administration process that saved over $22,000 annually, reduced document retrieval time by 50%, and reduced contract record setup time by 30%.

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The ABCs of Contract Management for NGOs and NPOs

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and nonprofit organizations (NPOs) are jumping on board with a very popular trend in process improvement; automated contract management. To be fair, though, contract automation is not so much a transitory “trend” as it is an essential, sustainable ingredient in NGO and nonprofit management.

THE WHYs

Streamlining and automating contract lifecycle management and compliance with a cross-operational electronic document management system not only eliminates the worries of back-office operations, but also drives more efficient execution of mission goals.

THE HOWs

So you want to become a successful and tech-savvy contract manager? That’s a respectable goal, and it’s also not as complex as you may think. Here are four down-to-earth tips to elevating your contract administration efficiency:

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Nonprofit Success Story: Global Nonprofit Executes Contracts Faster with DMS

nonprofit contract managementThere's a lot at stake working for a nonprofit, NGO, or NPO.

You have a mission to fulfill, and limited resources to fulfill it in an efficient and cost-effective manner. It's easy to lose sight of your cause when your backend processes take up all of your time. What you need is a workflow to help your mission accomplish itself.

We've discussed the benefits of a document management system for business process improvement, and for the next few weeks we'll be posting real-world Nonprofit and NGO Success Stories.

A $70M+ international nonprofit organization educates and helps others to prevent and control disease abroad. However, expanding their services to 140 countries requires a sophisticated contract management system. Here's how they addressed that problem with DMS, and how the savings in time and money helped them focus on their mission to save lives.

Read their success story here.

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4 Signs Your Contract Management System is Hurting Your NGO/NPO

We'd reported on a study conducted by the National Contract Management Association (NCMA), which opened our eyes to the rampant inefficiency plaguing the contract lifecyle management (CLM) of countless organizations – companies and NGOs/nonprofits sweeping the gamut of industry type, geographic location and size.

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Contract Management Software: Optimizing Contract Lifecycle Management

The National Contract Management Association (NCMA) conducted a study on contract management efficiency. The organization interviewed over 100 companies, from a wide range of industries headquartered in both the U.S. and Europe, on their contract management process – from contract creation and visibility/access to contract commitment control/tracking and risk management. Their findings were far from positive, but provided a crucial wake-up call for organizations of all sizes and industries: Companies aren’t coming close to achieving document control efficiency via contract management best practices. 

A few of the study’s eye-opening findings:

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Finding the Right Contract Management Software: Know Your Unique Needs

Let’s just say that contract management isn’t your organization’s strong suit.

  • You’re printing out copies upon copies of contracts. 
  • As you pass them around for review, some documents get lost in the shuffle. Some return to you with coffee-cup stains (and the apology note is appreciated, but there’s no magic eraser for this mark). And, where are the supporting documents?
  • You’re not sure where some copies are – Abandoned on someone’s desk? Wasting away under a pile of paper? Floating around aimlessly from department to department?
  • Above all, you’re worried approvals aren’t going to meet deadlines.

Yup, you fit the bill all right: You’re the perfect candidate for powerful contract management software. That’s right: There is a document management system out there that organizes and controls your records for you. No more paper pushing; no more coffee stains; no more approval ambiguities and deadline debacles.

How do you find the right contract management software for you?
First, know what you need:

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Five Reasons You Should Automate Your Contract Review Process

Why do organizations spend so much time and money writing, amending, circulating for approval, and storing contracts for years?  

The answer is simple:  

Contracts are at the heart of every major business transaction. They are critical to your business, and there are several reasons why you should automate your contract management process.

1.  Contract management is tedious, time consuming and an expensive process, often involving a variety of people that view it as extra work and not their primary job.  

  • An online contract management tool helps to make the process more efficient, saving both time and money for your organization.

2.  Contracts often get lost, or continuously put to the bottom of the pile during the routing and approval process. 

  • An automated contract management process takes a paper process and makes it a streamlined electronic process preventing contracts from getting lost as they move from one person to another providing alert mechanisms that avoid delays or 'desk-time' associated with traditional 'walk-around' approvals.

3.   Multiple versions of a contract often wind up circulating at the same time. Duplicated effort, wasted time, and revision tracking difficulties result. 
  • Multiple versions of a document are no longer a challenge using an automated contract management process. The contract is checked out/in each time it is edited, maintaining all versions in one controlled area. No confusion, no duplication of effort, and no more revision-tracking problems.

4.   The almost-final paper version of the contract may be left somewhere. Wasted effort, potentially comprised corporate intelligence, and missed deadlines loom. 
  • Using an online contract management tool prevents lost or compromised versions of the contract, communications are managed and stored within the application, and deadlines can be met.
  • Secure access is available via the Internet. Contracts are viewed, edited and approved online. No more contracts left in hotel rooms or coffee houses.

5.   Once they're approved using traditional methods, contracts and their revision history can get lost, destroyed or manipulated. How long does it take someone to find a contract, and its revisions, that was signed five years ago? 
  • An automated contract management process carefully tracks revisions, including the final executed version. No loss, damage or inadvertent changes after signatures are exchanged.
  • All of your contracts reside in a central and secure repository with notes and related documents, revision dates, and the final, executed contract.
  • Better yet, your team can create and store a library of favorite clauses and paragraphs that they can access for future contract reviews. Future contracts get done even faster.

The faster your team can get one deal and the contract completed and signed, the sooner they can get onto the next. 

Give us a call at 866.367.3467 ext. 1 or sign up for a demo below to find out how other organizations like yours are seeing as much as a 400% increase in revenues after subscribing to DocuVantage's online contract management software.

Schedule a demo of DocuVantageSee h
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Contract Processing: Paper, E-mail or Contract Document Management?

For those of you who have been involved in the negotiation of contracts, you know that coming to terms with the other party is often easier than your internal process of contract creation, review and approval.  It’s sad when you can agree with another party quickly and then get bogged down internally.   If you answer yes to any of the following, you have a contract processing problem:

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Process and Execute Contracts in Hours Not Weeks

When it comes to managing contracts there is no doubt your day can take a bad turn.  Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the increasing volume of contracts or the challenge of keeping up with the changing regulatory and auditing requirements?

If you are not using current technologies in your contract management process, you may be losing valuable time in providing goods and services, which in turn affects how fast your receivables come in.  Stop the practice of beginning work on contracts before contract execution.  By providing your contract management professionals with the needed tools to automate the process, you will not only stop the ongoing criticism related to delayed contract processing times, but you can also remove the bottlenecks associated with manual processing.

Where Are Your Contracts?

From the procurement process of landing a contract to delivery, there may be several people and several steps involved, even before execution, that generate vast amounts of paperwork.  This challenge increases even more when multiple delivery partners are involved or the contracts are delivered overseas and require international governing compliance and reporting.

Avoid confusion, delays and loss of control on your contracts with an easy to implement, cost effective web-based contract automation solution.  A few basic questions to ask when evaluating a solution:

•    Can you easily, search, retrieve and track contracts in each stage of processing?

•    Does it provide a check in and check out feature and stores each version in one central location?

•    Are there multiple levels of security depending on user access needed?

•    How does it avoid duplication of the contracts when edits are made?

•    Does it allow you to customize the workflow to relate specifically with your organization, including task assigning capabilities?

•    Can stakeholders electronically sign the contract from anywhere?

By asking these questions and more, you can clearly understand the different benefits and functionalities when choosing a document management system for contract management automation.  

With DocuVantage On Demand®, staff can access contracts from anywhere, using a web-browser, to complete their assigned tasks.  Contracts will move through the automated process that will assign tasks based upon your business rules, track activities to ensure that important tasks are completed in a timely manner, while providing a transparent view to remove bottlenecks and maintain compliance controls.

For more information on automating your contract management process please visit:  http://www.docuvantage.com/contract-management.

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