Contract management automation: Streamlining contracts with BPA
Businesses can optimize their processes and outcomes by automating contract management, thereby boosting productivity and efficiency, and reducing costs and errors.
Administrative tasks such as contract management often account for a large portion of a company’s total annual costs. These costs can be reduced by introducing technology-enabled automation, commonly known as Business Process Automation (BPA), which can improve workplace operations dramatically. In fact, companies are expected to spend $12.7 billion on these solutions by 2021. By investing in BPA and more specifically, contract management automation, companies can focus better on strategies and initiatives that add business value.
Being legally compliant is one of the most important aspects of a business and a contract management system can help organizations handle contracts more efficiently and in a scalable manner. However, with a large volume of complex contracts to manage, any limitations in existing systems can end up creating losses and liabilities for companies and damage reputations.
Contract management automation with BPA: How it works
There are several components and stages of contract management, which can be overwhelming and time-consuming in the absence of digitalization. Potential bottlenecks while creating, modifying, executing, renewing, or cancelling contracts using a manual contract administration system can affect relationships with contractors, vendors, and suppliers. Many contracts, however, have unique criteria that demand multi-level approval processes and legal evaluations in order to be efficiently executed.
With manually managed contracts, issues such as erroneous information or delayed contract execution can affect their approvals and overall business operations, including the company’s ability to deliver or receive services or products. Implementing an automated contract management solution using BPA is the best way to streamline your enterprise contract management system and reduce errors and delays in the process.
In addition to BPA, automated solutions also employ robotic process automation (RPA) to integrate with existing software/systems and link them to perform workflows and share data as per established business processes. This way, you can adapt your contract management solution to already established frameworks and govern them more effectively.
A fast and cost-effective way to get started with any kind of enterprise automation is to partner with an external solution development partner as compared to building an in-house team. A software development partner will assist you from beginning to end with all that you need, including mapping processes for the proposed solution and providing support, maintenance, and upgrade services for your automated systems.
While most contract management systems are easy to use and improve productivity in the long run with automated workflows and dashboards, users may take some to learn and adapt to them. This is something an external partner can help your employees with.
How does BPA improve contract management?
Software and custom-built solutions are used in a variety of ways to automate low-value, repetitive business processes, allowing people to devote more time to their key responsibility areas. Companies benefit from a variety of BPA programs that are implemented in the workplace. Contract management software is one such program or combination of programs undertaking processes from contract creation and implementation to completion or renewal.
The BPA-enabled automated contract management solution becomes a centralized control module that can be used to access, share, and modify all of the company’s contracts. The automated solution may also include an in-built or integrate database to build a repository of contracts which can be further secured with multi-factor authentication or even Blockchain.
Essentially, the contract management automation system will combine the business logic of the relevant processes with automated form generation and system-wide notifications to minimize human processes and dependencies, and reduce errors. By streamlining the contract management lifecycle, contract management software helps organizations manage legal compliance, vendors, and expenses more efficiently.
Furthermore, the solution can be integrated with existing digital, SaaS, or legacy systems for accounting, payroll, and human resource management. You can either build a flow involving your existing applications or create a new custom solution from scratch. A custom solution built on a BPA and RPA foundation will also help you centralize data storage and management for better efficiency in processes and automated communication between individual software and systems.
Conclusion
Businesses can use contract management software to streamline and automate the contract lifecycle in the most effective way. Such a solution enables organizations of any size to develop, administer, and track contracts quickly and easily. According to research, inefficient contract processes can result in losses ranging from 5% to 40% of the deal’s value. By deploying contract management automation, businesses can begin saving money and efforts while improving the efficiency of their contract management processes and systems.
For your business, contract management software could be a wise investment. It can help your company become more efficient, reduce costs, and save time in the workplace.
