Centralised storage and contract lifecycle automation made available by contract management systems makes it easier to quickly generate, approve, retrieve, and share contracts and related documents. It significantly aids in raising business productivity for small and medium-sized enterprises. For instance, e-signature implementation can boost an organisation’s productivity by up to 60%. For big businesses, a contract management system can shorten the time it takes to create, search, and finalise contracts, enforce contract execution, and improve regulatory compliance.
Businesses must deal with several contract elements during a contract lifecycle. Companies also need to handle stakeholder communication simultaneously. Additionally, the process becomes more difficult as you prepare to expand your company’s operations.
SharePoint is a proven platform for many applications, including websites, intranets, and business-critical systems. However, you can also use SharePoint for contract management processes. Thanks to its flexible, scalable, and user-friendly nature, many large and small businesses now prefer SharePoint for managing their contracts.
If your business is subscribed to SharePoint, you may use it to handle all your contracts effectively. Furthermore, it also spares you from paying for and maintaining a different solution.
Contract management in SharePoint helps businesses around the world streamline their operations. Let’s find out how it can help yours.
Why use SharePoint for Contract Management?
SharePoint is perfect for digital content, such as pictures, documents, videos, and other media types. Since business contracts are mostly documents, SharePoint should be your organisation’s go-to platform for all contracts, agreements, and Memorandum of Understanding (MoUs).
Here are some reasons you should use SharePoint for your business’s contract management needs.
1. Centralised Contract Management
Organisations can benefit from centralised contract management by storing all contracts in SharePoint. The SharePoint library repository is where you should save all contracts. Businesses can leverage SharePoint’s powerful document management and distribution features to manage contracts better. You can centrally manage access to each file or document.
2. Corporate Data Compliance and Security
The security features of your contract management system are of utmost importance for maintaining sensitive contract information. Depending on your industry or region, you should follow several national and international regulations, like GDPR, SOX, GLBA and HIPAA. Additionally, SharePoint offers businesses an entire access trail (view, edit, share, delete) for auditing.
SharePoint’s cutting-edge security architecture always keeps your documents secure. Some of its standard security features are data encryption (both at rest and in transit), two-factor authentication, malware protection, and data loss prevention policies.
3. Smooth Internal Communications
You can communicate with coworkers from the same contract management sites or workflows with SharePoint. Your team can, for instance, use SharePoint features like discussion boards, Yammer, content tagging with @, communication sites, and news feeds.
Besides serving as helpful software for collaborative work, SharePoint is also ideal for team communication. You don’t need to use additional communication programs since SharePoint includes individual and group communication features.
4. Automated Contract Process
You can reduce the amount of manual labour required and increase the productivity and efficiency of your team by automating the various processes associated with contract management. The application readily supports SharePoint custom development and workflow automation, making it simple to automate the contract workflow.
As a result, you have control over how each team member contributes to a contract during its entire lifecycle. Furthermore, the solution makes it simple to complete tasks like contract approval and review.
5. Third-Party App Integration
SharePoint supports integration with other Office 365 apps because it is a part of the Microsoft Office 365 suite. In addition, it also connects with other high-end CRM, ERP, ECM, OCR, intelligence, and analytics programmes. As a result, you can use the integrated tool to open contracts stored in SharePoint without frequently switching between two solutions.
6. Scalable and Cost-Friendly
You don’t need to second-guess your decision to utilise SharePoint for contract management if you already use it for document management. Your company doesn’t incur any additional costs in this situation. Even if you don’t use the software for contract management, it is still an affordable option compared to the cost of using a dedicated system for contract management.
More importantly, being a scalable software, you can customise SharePoint to meet your company’s ever-rising demands.
7. Usability
By choosing a different contract management software, your entire crew will have to undergo training to become familiar with the new product. However, by utilising SharePoint, you and your team can focus on running the business rather than spending long hours trying to master a new tool.
Thanks to its user-friendly interface, even novice users will require little training to get acquainted with SharePoint. Additionally, it includes various training tools and instructions that users can use for quick and practical learning.
SharePoint features that help with contract management.
Now that you know the benefits of using SharePoint for contract management, let’s look at various features that could help manage contracts.
1. Customisable templates
SharePoint has a vast library of document templates from which you can select one for your contract purposes. As a result, you don’t have to go through the trouble of creating a contract from scratch. Simply choose an appropriate template and customise it to your requirements.
You can also utilise a customised electronic contract form. Real estate agents, for example, can easily access the form from the customers’ premises, and business administrators can easily edit it with a few clicks.
2. Automate Contract Creation
Businesses can partially automate contract creation by using the unique SharePoint questionnaires. By responding to some questions about contracts, users can, for instance, add fields and terms to a contract. This SharePoint feature aids in risk management because contracts involve legal obligations.
3. Approval-centric workflow
Another aspect of SharePoint that will help you with contract management is the more straightforward approval process. You can assemble a group of concerned stakeholders, automatically submit a contract for approval, or notify them when the contract draft is ready.
4. Hierarchical Linking
Organisations dealing with various connected contracts will benefit significantly from managing and hierarchically storing contracts. Businesses can preserve the continuity of the contracts and keep them organised by linking the contracts in a parent-child relationship.
Additionally, this feature simplifies managing contracts because any modifications you make to the principal contract will affect its subordinate contracts.
6. Automatic Alerts
You may plan automatic alerts and notifications in SharePoint for contract-related events, such as contract status, expiration date, and other milestones. Timely alerts help in preventing unwanted contracts from automatically renewing.
7. Powerful Content Search
SharePoint’s robust search function lets you find the contract you want in a few clicks. Additionally, contract management in SharePoint helps businesses intelligently look up an agreement by its file name, metadata, keywords, or even full text. You can filter and sort the search results according to your needs for a specific search.
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Conclusion
SharePoint is an excellent option for organisations of all shapes and sizes due to its wide range of features. Thanks to its exceptional security, privacy controls, scalability, and built-in capabilities for contract creation, reviewing, and negotiation, SharePoint can assist firms in implementing effective contract management.
Small organisations can consider SharePoint for contract management, seeking affordable yet efficient solutions. Large businesses will surely appreciate SharePoint’s robust search, compliance assistance and integration-friendliness that helps connect the platform with other enterprise solutions and foster a collaborative environment.
If you need more than the out-of-the-box features of SharePoint for your business needs, all you need to do is get in touch with us. Our team of SharePoint experts will provide you with a customised and fully-scalable contract management solution depending on your organisational needs and industry standards.
You can contact us by calling +971-521043226 or leaving a message at info@neologix.ae.
