How to Centralize and Automate Your Vendor Contract Lifecycle Management Process

The Cost of Inefficient Contract Management

Staying on top of the contract lifecycle can be one of the most frustrating and time-consuming parts of vendor management. Why?

• Negotiating and renewing contracts can involve endless back-and-forth emails.
• Storing and reviewing contracts can be a version control nightmare.
• Spreadsheets are often the go-to solution for tracking key contract attributes.

It’s no wonder that business owners frequently try to skirt established contracting processes – especially when making a time-sensitive or one-off purchase. When this happens, procurement teams are left unaware of newly contracted services, while legal teams are unable to enforce protections in contracts.

It’s easy to see this scenario playing out at smaller, under-resourced organizations without dedicated vendor contract management functions. However, it can be just as much of a challenge for larger enterprises with decentralized procurement departments. Regardless of your company size, it’s clear that inefficient contract management can lead to unnecessary costs and increased business risk.

So, how can you strengthen contract lifecycle management process without hampering business agility?

Introducing Prevalent Contract Essentials

Today, Prevalent is introducing Contract Essentials, a SaaS-based contract lifecycle management solution that centralizes the distribution, discussion, retention, and review of vendor contracts. It also includes contract workflow capabilities to automate the lifecycle from onboarding to offboarding. With Contract Essentials, procurement and legal teams have a single solution to manage vendor contracts, simplify management and review, and reduce cost and risk – while eliminating hurdles for business owners.

Standardize Contract Intake, Onboarding and Workflow

Contract Essentials standardizes the contract intake and onboarding process, enabling you to populate vendor contract data via a browser-based form or API connection. The solution’s customizable workflow functionality then automates the entire contract lifecycle – progressing contracts from negotiation and terms, to review and signing. It also enables procurement managers to assign and track tasks, such as automated reminders or overdue notices, facilitating clear communication between all parties.

Customizable workflow ensures that all parties know where a contract is in its lifecycle. Built-in discussions ensure that everyone is updated on changes.

Streamline Collaboration and Simplify Redlining

Contact Essentials also streamlines collaboration and simplifies redlining. For instance, users can upload and share contract revisions with version control tracking. Document changes can be reviewed offline and then re-inserted into the workflow.

Furthermore, role-based permissions and audit trails help to ensure secure documentation storage and sharing, both inside and outside your organization. This approach also improves efficiency and speeds the approval process by tracking changes and ensuring that teams are always working on the correct document version.

Keep Track of Contract Discussions and Comments

To aid negotiation and review processes, Contract Essentials centralizes and timestamps all contract discussions, while notifying participants via email whenever new comments are added. Comments can be shared externally with vendors or marked for internal discussion only. By capturing all changes in a single conversation, Contract Essentials ensures that all parties have a single source of information for negotiation and review.

Stay on Top of Contract Status and Be Alerted to Key Milestones

Contract Essentials enables procurement and legal teams to centrally track all contracts, while delivering visibility into attributes such as contract type, key dates, contract value, reminders, and status. Users can have customized views based on their role and receive reminders of expiring contracts and other important events.

Visualize all important contract details in a single table.

Enable Business Owners to Participate in the Contracting Experience

The solution’s granular, role-based permissions enable allocation of responsibilities, access to contracts, and read/write/modify access, so that users see only what is relevant to their jobs. Business users are also empowered with workflow, task, and discussion tracking, so they can maintain visibility into the contract lifecycle and fully participate in managing their vendors.

My Contracts centralizes documents per owner to ensure visibility.

Unify Vendor Contract Management with Third-Party Risk Management

Contract Essentials is part of the Prevalent Third-Party Risk Management Platform. Prevalent equips customers with an integrated TPRM solution for centralized management of third-party security, privacy, business, financial, and contract risks – all backed by a common risk register with risk scoring, remediation, and reporting capabilities. This approach delivers proactive visibility into third-party risk, while maturing your operations for maximum resilience when incidents arise.

Take the Next Step to Automate Vendor Contract Lifecycle Management

Managing vendor contracts doesn’t have to be an all-consuming, manual process. With Contract Essentials, it’s easy to streamline the contract lifecycle and align it with your existing vendor risk management processes. As a result, you’ll maintain a holistic view of third-party risk while enabling business owners to do their jobs – with minimal hassle.

For more on how Prevalent can help, download the Contract Essentials data sheet or request a demo today.