Bringing Together Contract Lifecycle Management and Analytics with Docusign CLM+

Contracts are used in every department, in organizations of every size and even the most common of these contract processes are complex. The larger your organization is, the number of stakeholders and the complexity of the contract management process only increases. Transforming enterprise contract management requires an interconnected, common platform that supports all of the business functions that need to prepare, negotiate, sign, act on, manage and analyze contracts. 

The challenge of separate contract management solutions

Up to now, organizations have had to rely on separate solutions to address different stages of the contract process. Contract lifecycle management (CLM) software can help automate contract workflows and centralize contracts in a single repository. But CLM solutions often fall short of delivering a key capability that organizations need: the ability to uncover risks and act on opportunities hidden in the language of contracts across the entire lifecycle. 

Many companies have addressed this by purchasing separate solutions to solve the different challenges of contract management and contract analytics. Procurement teams need insight across the source-to-pay process and are often already using other spend management systems like SAP Ariba. Sales needs a contract generation solution that connects to the CRM system. And the legal team may need contract analytics to automate their review process and assess risk. This creates duplication of functionality and disconnected processes in each functional silo. 

The result is a lack of business agility. Organizations without a combined platform for contract analytics and CLM cannot gain a clear understanding of what risks and opportunities are in their contracts, and more importantly are unable to act on those risks or opportunities.

In some cases, organizations turn to outside legal services to manually analyze their contract portfolio, yet such a process can only represent a limited view in time; incoming contracts miss out on needed analysis and efficiencies. And after outside analysis is completed, the insights gathered are not easily integrated into the contract management software, making it difficult to act on them. 

A combined solution for contract lifecycle management and contract analytics

Effectively managing the full contract lifecycle requires an integrated platform that includes core CLM functionality plus contract analytics that can be extended across all business domains. Docusign CLM+ is part of the Docusign Agreement Cloud and combines Docusign CLM with Docusign Analyzer and Docusign Insight to deliver combined contract management and AI-powered contract analytics in a single, integrated platform. CLM+ helps organizations automate workflows intelligently across the entire contract lifecycle. The result is greater visibility into risks and opportunities at dramatically lower cost compared to manual analysis of inbound and stored contracts.

CLM+ empowers organizations to: 

• Uncover risk automatically: Ingest contracts, calculate risk and make smarter negotiating decisions. Access risk scorecards from within CLM or Microsoft Word to inform edits, approvals and next steps.

• Drive workflows intelligently: Enable analytics, risk score and contract content to conditionally drive workflows and accelerate contract cycle time. Make contract and risk analysis part of every contract workflow.

• Surface insights easily: Identify and act-on risks, obligations, and opportunities hidden across the entire contract portfolio. Enable true business agility through complete contract visibility.

Uncover risk automatically for better, faster negotiation

Docusign Analyzer brings advanced contract analytics to the pre-execution state of the contract process. Now you can review and negotiate inbound agreements with automated clause and term extraction, as well as configurable, in-depth risk analysis. This gives you a clear understanding of what you are agreeing to before you sign. Analyzer helps procurement teams confidently negotiate third party supplier agreements by automatically identifying high-risk terms based on your own legal standards. Sales and legal can use Analyzer to route contracts based on assessed risk, increasing efficiency, reducing the drain on valuable legal resources and closing deals faster.

Drive workflows intelligently based on risk assessment

CLM+ makes it possible to set up workflows that can conditionally route contracts based on detected risks or content directly within a CLM workflow. You can also automate contract review by automatically replacing high-risk identified clauses with pre-approved alternatives from your legal team. The result is less manual time required by contract administrators and legal counsel, and accelerated contract turnaround time.

Surface insights easily to drive business value

Docusign Insight helps you easily surface organizational risks, obligations and opportunities in your completed contracts wherever they may be stored. Combining contract analytics with CLM accelerates contract search and increases the breadth and accuracy of reviews, giving stakeholders actionable insights to drive business value.

CLM+ allows organizations to make quicker and better informed decisions when negotiating, decrease contract cycle times with smarter workflows and create a more agile organization with portfolio visibility. 

Learn more about Docusign CLM+.