Beyond workflows – now you can model business process activities. The sales account manager needs to review the initial contract with his/her manager, then send it for technical review. Once done, he/she needs to share the contract document with the customer as a draft and once gotten back needs to send it to the contracts team to get a legal review … these activities, user tasks need sometimes reminders and ownership and these activities are not just approval workflows or review workflows. Now, we support this level of design activity and business process modeling for different processes with non-intrusive,but pro-active reminders and user tasks generated for sales or procurement. We also support the more formal workflows for review, approval and signatures.
Introducing Support for Contract Classes – Now you are able to manage multiple classes of contracts (not just contract types which we have supported for a long time now) but actually being able to have different follow up actions, activities and application functionality depending on the contract class – Master Contracts and Sub-Contracts management, Prime Contracts and Contract Modifications, Master Services Agreements and Normal Contracts (SOWs, Purchase Contracts, etc.), among many other classes of contracts with different requirements, relationships and even terminology.
Allow the business (sales, procurement, business areas) access to contracts repository, and engagement in the contracts process early with Contracts Business Portal. With the recently introduced business user portal eContracts now allows for contract management groups to rollout self-service, request management and workflow processes throughout the organization. The Business Portal also allows easy access to existing contracts from the repository with appropriate security driven by whom the user is in the organization.
Rules based support for non-standard contracts. Contract management teams, sales and procurement organizations can setup rules and highlight non standard clauses, meta-data and documents allowing for easy identification and management of non-standard contracts with specialized workflows and approval processes for non-standard contracts.
Search goes all the way -Full Text Search, Contract Search and Counter Party Search. Users are able to quickly find not just contracts,but find documents, counter parties with the new and improved search. This search works with the native SharePoint search by providing additional filters and drill downs for the search so users are able to further refine the search. Users are also able to search on PDF documents, Word documents, presentations or even excel sheets (pricing sheets for example) as part of the search.
Creating Contracts should be a breeze and it is – Speedy contracts. A smart contract creation wizard that automatically pre-fill most of your forms entries based on default selections and preferences setup by the contract management group for easier contract creation process. Users need to just verify information before making submissions. After creation, other optional metadata and documents can be added.