3 Ways To Take The Pain Out Of Contract Management

By Author: Darshan Kulkarni
Total Articles: 3

As everyone is witnessing an ever-improving technological landscape, the contract management service has become a commonplace among the procurement professionals. However, there are some challenges that are associated with contract management. The key challenge becomes the maintenance of contract repositories with the rigor. Organizations come with a well-embedded resource for the enterprise planning system. However, it solely cannot guarantee contracts to be successfully managed. It might be due to the lack of willingness for improving the process. Most of the teams, nowadays, are seeking the best ideas to manage contracts effectively. But why is it so hard? To know more, keep reading on.

Why does it become so hard to manage?
The supplier contracts offer a detailed overview of the pipeline of the upcoming and current projects within the organization. Without sight’s line, the function might be on backfoot right when the project ends or termination of contracts happen. This might be of specific concern in areas like software and telecoms where the significant penalties get charged when the contracts roll over on an automatic basis. Problems might occur in regards to the filing, updating, and storing process. This results in procurement to potentially acquire zero visibility over multiple contractors. This also creates significant risk in case suppliers cannot manage through the lifestyle of the contract.
However, the below-offered ways can help you take the pain out of contract management. To know more on this front, keep reading on.

3 Ways to Improve Contract Management
An up-to-date and well-maintained repository can help in providing an overall overview of contracts in the operations. Integrating contract management is the key to become part of procurement teams. The steps that can improve contract management have been mentioned below.
1) One must make the team accountable – One must include contract KPI in the objective of the procurement team. The category managers and buyers must be responsible to ensure they hold the signed supplier contracts for categories that they work on. As a matter of fact, it should also be their utmost responsibility for gathering them from the departments.
2) Capitalizing on the result – The procurement leaders must routinely review the compliance of teams with contract management solutions. They also must actively use the output in order to drive more advanced category planning and adopt better organizing workload methods.
3) Choosing the best technological solution – One must use a stand-out contract management solution. And as a matter of fact, it happens to be an important factor to keep in mind while intending to improve contract management. However, it can also get neglected on its own. So, one should always choose the integrated procurement technological solution which can link contract management with modules like supplier performance management and spending analytics. The integrated solution connecting various modules together can offer an output which informs better ways for decision-making.
Wrap up

It is crucial to embed contract management practice and incentivize the team in order to keep the repository up to date. However, once this is in the place, the procurement function can be used effectively.