Contract Management with SharePoint

Feb. 6, 2012 - PRLog -- In the business world everything seems to involve a contract of one sort or another. At its core a contract is a document in which a number of people have to work on together and sign. In so doing they are making a formal agreement. This can be a more traditional legal contract or just a project requirements document. Regardless of the form, it involves some level of collaboration between people who, many times, are not in the same location. In this article I will focus on a business-to-business contract, but please bear in mind that there are many types of contracts that this also applies to.

Most companies have to deal with thousands of contracts every year. Some are boilerplates (like NDA’s, service orders, or purchase orders) while some are not. Smart companies are looking to improve, automate and systemize these processes as much as possible. Many times the signing of contracts can directly influence affect the companies bottom-line. The longer it takes for a contract to be signed, the larger the financial cost for that company. By implementing a workflow in SharePoint a business analyst or manager can come back and identify how long different stages of the contracts process can take. This allows them to identify bottlenecks in their process. On the basis of business intelligence areas for improvement can be identified.

The importance of making sure a contract does not skip a step, or alternatively, does not go through too many steps, is another big reason why companies are creating custom workflows in SharePoint. With a custom-developed SharePoint workflow, a company can assure that a contract goes through all appropriate departments and is correctly signed off before it is released to the other party. For instance, if a contract is over let’s say 5 dollars, then it needs to go through budget for approval. On the other hand, if it is under 5 dollars it can skip the budget department altogether.

SharePoint’s ability to integrate with other applications is also a big draw here. The ability to create contracts that are largely auto-filled from Customer Relationship Systems (CRM) or Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERP) is a boon in a number of ways. People have the assurance that they have not poorly transcribed information from one system to the next. They also save boatloads of time not having to transcribe what can be large amounts of information. Additionally these contracts can be stored in many formats including Word, PDF or InfoPath.

For some companies the coup de grace is automatic alerts. For instance, SharePoint can be configured to automatically alert the appropriate people when a contract is coming up for renewal. Missing a contract renewal deadline can mean big-bucks for any company. Why stop there? You can have SharePoint customized to automatically kick up a custom contracts renewal workflow when a contracts’ deadline is approaching.

To break all this down, there is a rich amount of functionality that can be brought to the different contract lifecycles that every company has to deal with. Companies can save large amounts of time and money by having custom SharePoint workflows developed. By doing so they are also mitigating risk related to poorly transcribed documents and missed renewals.  In fact, contract management with SharePoint can provide all kinds of value and functionality to any company.  The sky’s the limit.