Contract Management
The Challenge
Have you ever forgot a notice and extended a contract without realizing it? Have you ever missed the chance of renegotiating and achieving better terms? Do you need to formulate contractual clauses from scratch or copy them from old contracts again and again and thus have no security regarding their consistency, timeliness and, finally, legality? Are contract data managed in department-specific spreadsheets, data bases and ERP systems or are even stored in local file structures? Are you therefore lacking the total overview of all contracts with one business partner and of the complete contract lifecycle? Is it difficult or even impossible for you to present the contract with valid signatures of the contracting parties in a short time in the case of dispute? All this costs time and money and can even have legal consequences.
As all tasks are displayed in the appropriate contract file, it is assured that no deadlines are missed.
The Solution: Contract Management with OpenWorkdesk
Contract management with WeWebU OpenWorkdesk allows the transparent and efficient creation, management, monitoring and archiving of any kind of contracts and related business correspondence in one central Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system. It replaces department-specific, isolated applications and is quickly configured for different contract types and file views. Thus you can use it individually and flexibly. Furthermore, it provides all functionalities needed for contract management. Electronic contract files with a predefined structure are created at the push of a button. Automatically, a new contract number is generated and will be applied to all new documents related to the contract. By means of simple integration into backend systems, data such as customer number, name and address are checked or transferred. A pool of approved templates with up-to-date clauses assists clerks in creating contract-related documents. Moreover, OpenWorkdesk Zero-Install Desktop Integration fills fields in Microsoft Office documents with metadata – like e.g. the policy number – from the ECM system. This is fast and convenient and ensures data consistency at the same time.
Tasks related to single documents or complete contract files are assigned to single employees or whole departments. All tasks are displayed in the appropriate file as well as in the respective inboxes and can be found quickly via specific searches. Hence efficient deadline monitoring is made easy and either terminating contracts in time or renegotiating better conditions is ensured.
Documents related to a certain contractual context are often stored in different systems, e. g. scanned legacy contracts in an electronic archive system and new contracts in the works in an ECM system. All these documents are displayed in a single electronic contract file. This provides clerks with a unified and complete business view and spares them longsome retrievals. But also searches, if necessary at all, are system-spanning and all found documents and files are shown in one single hit list. Normally, it is difficult to display all these documents from different systems in a consistent way. Not so with contract management with OpenWorkdesk! Its Advanced Document Viewing ensures exactly that. Additionally, it generates thumbnail preview pictures of the documents that – if displayed in hit lists – enable a fast and convenient identification of certain documents.
The highly sophisticated role concept of OpenWorkdesk guarantees that the clerk using it for contract management always gets only those information and functions he needs. The views on data and documents exactly fit to the clerk’s designated role. Thus, copious avigation falls into oblivion and data security increases. For example, employees in the purchasing department create new supplier contracts using templates and save them in the respective supplier file whereas members of the controlling department see them in the folder “New purchasing contracts” and thus get a fast overview of all current activities. Additionally, the views “Soon expiring contracts” and “All contracts of a certain supplier” support all clerks in starting new or re-negotiations.
WeWebU OpenWorkdesk separates applications and ECM back-end systems. Thus it guarantees the protection of investments and provides futureproofness. Furthermore, it does completely without any installation on the client PC. Therefore, project and administration costs decrease especially in organization with decentralized structures. In this way, regional proximity to the contracting partner and fast rollout go hand in hand with contract management based on WeWebU OpenWorkdesk.
