Streamline Your Contract Management Workflow Automation for Staffing

Contract management workflow automation for Staffing

[Music] hello there my name is Quintin Russell and I am the content marketing specialist here at doc 365 and today we're going to be looking at how an automated contract management system with added vendor management capabilities can benefit your business so before we get started I wanted to take a quick look at our agenda for today so first we're going to briefly go over who we are and what we do then we're going to define what an automated contract management system is after that we'll take a look at what features you should expect from an automated contract management system and then from there we'll go into different reasons why your company may need not have made it CMS finally we're going to take a look at specific benefits that you can come to expect out of a CMS system and then finally we're gonna wrap things up by taking a quick look at dr. 65s contract management solutions so that you can see what one looks like in action and kind of get a picture of what you should expect going forward so really quick again I'd like to just ask that everyone makes sure to mute their microphones so that everyone can have a great webinar experience so um for those of you who don't know who we are we're dr. 65 we're a software company located out of Jacksonville Florida we specialize in building enterprise level SharePoint solutions for businesses and all kinds of industries we have over 17 years of experience working with SharePoint to build powerful Internet portals and other business tools including effective contract management solutions that said you're not really here to talk to hear me talk about us so what's going on with defining what an automated contract management system is so what exactly is one um an automated contract management system there's any platform that is designed to store and manage legal agreements it's designed basically these can include your clients your vendors and any other parties off they will automate and streamline admin tasks to reduce business overheads and provide a single unified view of each contract so now that you kind of know what that is what exactly can it do well an automated CMS can be used to manage the contract management process from the creation / negotiation of a contract all the way to implementation it allows you to track every step of the process and ensure that you have all the information you need at every stage of the contract lifecycle because you know we all know that it's impossible to make good decisions in business without having all the data um and this is especially important with your contracts where you're also having to worry about compliance on whether that's complying with the terms of the contract and local governments with all these different things and by not having all that information you not only risk making bad decisions and we'll go into how that can happen later but also you risk opening yourselves up to different fees fines any potential lawsuits so essentially um an automated CMS can really help with a lot of that and instead of having to manually keep track of everything it does a lot of the more menial tasks about that for you and it keeps you alerted to anything that's going on whether that's routine notifications on different stations in the contract or you know any weird things happening that shouldn't be happening so moving on what features can you really expect from an automated CMS um so just kind of going through the list here standardized contract process basically what you can do is you can build these out and then deploy them without really having to have a novel approach to each contract that you're building you're also not just limited to creating one type of contract process because you know there's a difference there's tons of different type of contracts that you're working with so you can set up a standardized process for working with clients working with vendors or working with other businesses in different forms of partnership moving on to task automation so this kind of goes back to standardized contract processing but really you can automate a lot of the tasks that people have to do and to cut down on the menial tasks of contract management so you know this can include checking up checking on the terms of the contract we might on setting up dates in your calendar to look over different aspects of the calendar of the contract and it from whether that's you know at the midway point or whether you're deciding to renew the contract which moves us into automated alerts these allow you to keep track of your contracts throughout their lifecycle and will notify you on any actions that you may need to take and next one's a big one it's a central contract repository this allows you to store all of your contracts in one place that you can really cut down on the chance of you losing them and we'll go into that because that might seem like it's a far out they're not a really big problem but it's actually more common than you think it is so moving on to multi-party collaboration with a contract management system you should be able to collaborate with members both in and out of your organization to create negotiated contracts which moves into the next feature you should expect which is e signature integration with these immature integration you won't have to wait on someone to sign the hard version of a contract instead you can send it to them over email or you can share it with them and they should be able to sign off on it and it's good to go moving on to financial tracking with this you can see the total dollar amount of your contracts and track a lot of the financial aspects of the contract management process so this can be like I said your like total dollar amount or you can see the financial aspects of individual contracts groups of contracts types of contracts that sort of thing next up is a search functionality with this you should be able to search through your contacts by tags and keywords to find the ones that you're looking forward to cut down on a lot of the administrative time that is normally spent tracking down contracts which can actually add up to a sizable amount over time on next up is reporting in dashboards this is pretty basic you should expect this out of any business application that you're using this allows you to track the progress of your contracts and how to perform where each one is that how many are at what stage on this can really help you make informed decisions about maybe any changes you need to make in your contract management process so seeing whether or not you know how many how many contracts are you actually closing if this is focused on the client side of things you know how many contracts are close to renewal how many do you need to take a look at etcetera etc on secure storage contracts are pretty sensitive information so you need to make sure that you're able to keep them safe from you know any prying third parties who you really don't want to have access to this confidential information contract and template libraries are basically these let you save templates and reuse them for different situations so you know if there's no me if you're approaching a new situation with a new client and you contact a new vendor etcetera etc and you don't really need to do a lot of negotiation you can just pull out a contract template send it over to them and save a lot of time throughout this process and then finally you know good feature that you should expect is automated approval and request workflows basically these make sure that each step of the contract management process flows smoothly and transitions into the next step without any big gaps or you know issues that normally come with regular contract management so yeah I know that was a lot but now that you know what features you should expect from an automated CMS I kind of wanted to take a look at some of the reasons why you might be able to benefit from using an automated CMS so for example for companies that have a high contract volume so you know they're doing really well highly successful an automated CMS can really help you keep contracts from getting lost no matter how many you have because they're all stored within that central system that allows you search through it there's also some companies might have struggle with wasted time throughout the contract management process so a CMS can really streamline and automate tasks allowing me to save time and really devote your resources to the work that isn't just administrative that isn't just you know moving and getting it moving through the different steps of the process um some companies struggle with slow turnaround like I said by streamlining and automating a lot of the you know contract management processes you can you can save time and really speed up how quickly a contract is able to go live and be viable and you can get to the implementation step some companies have security concerns like I said a CMS allows you to store your contracts securely without fear especially if you're using a SharePoint based contract management system like dart 365's um because it's sharepoint and it's stored with Microsoft and their in their servers there are a lot of different security aspects that you can add to your system to ensure that it's even safer including multi-factor authentication um and then finally some companies struggle with inaccurate reporting because if they're using a manual contract management process it can be difficult to put all that information together in one place so an automated CMS will compile all of your contract activities and reports that you can then view so that really you know I've kind of been covering why you might need a CMS you know what features you should be expecting but let's kind of take a look at it let's take a step back for a second and take a look at why you know what what are the effects of poor contract management because really this you know a lot of you are here to see what you know the positives that it can do for you but a lot of times you we don't think about the negative aspects of pork contract management so for example lost revenue on companies with pork contract management lose risk losing up to 9.2 percent of the revenue each year in addition to that companies with pork contract management have a 20 percent lower conversion and normal so you know you're losing out on money you're not converting as much so you're not bringing in as much money and in addition to that poor contract management caught on causes you to face increased administrative costs up to about 25 to 30 percent higher so it makes financial sense to invest in a tool or solution that allows you to really save money but not only that you know a contract management system can really help you eliminate human error recent survey found that forty percent of respondents that the human error negatively affects contract management and their company in addition to that the Journal of contract management found that 71% of businesses can't locate 10 percent of their contracts and then finally 65 percent of legal professionals identify wasted time as the biggest pain point in contract management so essentially you going back to my point you can't afford not to use an automated contract management system it is in your financial interest to invest in one in law might seem like a larger cost up front it's a long term benefit that can help you save a lot of money and bring in more money essentially over time so then really hammering in what the benefits of an automated CMS are first of all an automated CMS gives you there's less risk to using one and it offers you more control it allows you to track your contract data maintain histories and audit trails and it allows you to control the distribution of your contract content on the automated systems allow you to automate many of the manual steps of the process and eliminate unnecessary tasks that can be bogging you down and slowing down your operations I an automated CMS gives you direct content access and allows you to quickly find and access contracts like I said to save time and additionally it allows you to ensure continuity so you can cut down on processing and response time to close contract management gaps so you know it saves you money allows you to keep track of everything that you're doing and it saves you time um but not only that it offers you secure data storage so you know while you might have manual copies of your contracts odd like I said those get lost so using an automated CMS you can keep copies of contracts and store them in a central accessible repository that then going back to the search functionality allows you to quickly find what you're looking for without having to sort through different computers so I'm going to sort through your emails having to sort through different files if you're storing it manually which again data consolidation um you're keeping everything in one place and in addition to that if you're using a SharePoint based project content contract management system you're able to also integrate a lot of your different business applications into your platform so instead of having to log in to multiple accounts you can keep everything within SharePoint meaning that you can you only have to use a single sign-on which is much more secure than having multiple sign ons across different accounts that use you know that would probably be using the same username and the same password not only that but an automated CMS allows you to improve communication with your contract management process um basically it facilitates a lot of the communication across different departments and everything and allows everyone to know what's going on with the contracts when different things need to happen and you know when something and you know when something needs to be done and what needs to be done with it there's no you know gaps in the process like we've been saying it just allows you to keep on top of everything and ensure that everyone knows what they're doing which is probably the most vital part of the contract management process if people don't know what they're doing there's going to be mistakes there's going to be failures and that goes into compliance if you are not able to ensure compliance with your contract management system then why are you investing again you're opening yourself up to lawsuits fines and fees things that you've done that can impose a great financial risk on your company and right now when things are is uncertain as they are you cannot afford to have any part of your contract management system leave you vulnerable to the to having to pay these fines these fees essentially there is no downside to making the switch to an automated contract management system it is nothing but pure benefit for you so now that I've kind of gone over at that we've really taken a look at the reasons why you want to use an automated CMS we would like to borrow a bit more of your time to go over our automated contract management system so I may be biased but I think the darks 365's contract management solution is a powerful resources for companies that are looking to more effectively manage their contracts um I think it looks pretty good and we've even improved on the way that it looks from when this screenshot was taken and the best part about it is that we can also make sure that it is fully branded for your company so instead of it saying dock up there in the corner um it didn't have your company's logo it can feature your company's colors and they can be configured to look the way that you need it to for your you know for your business with that said I'm going to pass things off to my colleague Ben Senjem so he's our enterprise sales executive he is also a master of all of Doc's products but specifically our contract management solution and he'll be taking you on a tour of our tool and it really explored the different futures that you can find useful as you improve your contract management process excellent thank you so much Quintin to that introduction we go ahead and share my screen here so we're gonna go in a high level overview of our contract management system here and what automations it can provide your company you know automation as Quinten kind of touched on is it's vital as far as contract management especially as your company begins to grow you know you want to make sure you're staying on top of your contracts that you're able to shop around for you know maybe you know different different rates from vendors making sure that you know you're staying compliance there's all kinds of benefits to that and our contract management will provide that automation that you're probably looking for you know I talked to companies pretty much all day every day and it's pretty astounding the number of companies that still use kind of spreadsheets a store you know contracts on like a kind of shared drive or something like that and they kind of just try to stay on top of you know when the the contracts can expire using you know maybe like Outlook or something so it's it can be very difficult to keep up with so with our contract management it's going to provide all the notifications you need and automation for approvals etc so I'm gonna give you a quick walkthrough here this is going to be our dashboard right here in the dashboard it's going to tell you the number of contracts are expiring in a certain number of days so in this example this is a thirty sixty ninety days you can click these buttons that'll go right in to show you those contracts are expiring then it's very important for these to be front and center as soon as you log into your contract management we also have you know data all this is customizable on our dashboard to your needs so if there's a ditional data that you really want to capture we that be able to add that for you so you can see that value for active contracts how many active contracts you actually have you know which department is spending the most what would stage your contracts in and you know what type of contracts are out there currently so we have all these reporting functions that we can actually you know have for you here in our contract management system there's it's also capable of doing vendor contracts customer contracts or customer and vendor contracts there's all kinds of capabilities to it but let's say we're going to check out the vendor contract side of it so as I click the contracts tab over here in the left hand side it takes this newer contracts these are where you'll be able to see and currently an admin view which means I can see all the contracts within all the departments right here in this nice layout I can easily search through contracts right here if I wanted to so it quickly finds them I also have filtering capabilities over here so if I was looking for contracts within a certain stage different progress approved rejected contracts in a certain departments or contracts in a certain location there's all kinds of filtering capabilities that I had there and also I can find you know contracts maybe expiring it then the next hundred days or something that's kind of a handy little feature there so this will allow you to quickly find contracts that you need right away and as Quintin kind of said a lot of companies struggle to find contracts this pretty much alleviates all that it's pretty much laid out here nicely for you as I go into a contract we'll check out see what that looks like you know you can store the effective dates right here you can assign you know what type of contract it is who the vendor is from this contract you can have you know location what department it is you can change the active status if you'd like it also has permissions so you can easily add a group of people within your company that can see this particular contract if they're at this group of people and this can be made in the settings that this group of people isn't in here they can that's you this contract at all so it's great for security and you can quickly and easily configure who can see what so it's very nice here within the owner area you can simply add somebody's name this means that we'll get notifications for this contract that's that automation we're kind of talking about so they'll get notifications when it's about to expire during the approval process is something needs to be looked at they'll get notifications so they'll know how to know when to act on it as I come over here into the documents area of this contract this is where you can literally store the actual contract here with the signatures you know we do have version history so if you want to see the different versions of the contract you could have that here I'll show you version one two three and you can see in each individual one there's redlining capabilities so if you're wanting to edit and go back for thin contracts I'll show you you know who edited was at this time and what they added and we also have a Dobby sign and integrations so basically you can open the SharePoint library here so you can basically go into here and select the contract and what you'll basically do is you know you'll go get signatures they'll tell the system who it needs to go to type in their email address it will fire off - you know maybe defender if they need to sign something or a customer as soon as they sign it it's going to end up right back in here in the system signed and ready to go so it really takes that you know manual process of emailing this contracts out you know to vendors or customers telling me you need to sign this will pretty much do it for you they'll sign it it'll pop right back in here and then you'll be notified when it's in here we also have templates as well this saves time so you can quickly select a contract template maybe and how that you're ready for you that's kind of a big thing to kind of have so you're not having to dig around looking for the appropriate contract or document that you want to have in here just quickly select it import the document right into here as far as workflows this is a huge thing for approvals this there's a lot of time wasted emailing people back and forth can you review this contract let me know what you think doesn't need anything else with this workflow which can be easily generated in the settings tab over here we can make these workflows for approval so what will happen you know in the first stage you can have as many stages as you want in the first stage these would be essentially the provers in this example it's Joe and then they have until you know April 6 - you know approve the contract that already have them but you know i pathetic lee they can leave notes in here a bit like and to kind of communicate with each other and as soon as they go on and click either approve need more info or reject that the hit approve that we've gone to the next stage need more info the people the contract owners will get notifications that something else needs to be looked at in this case it's been or if they reject they'll go back to Ben as well and say hey you know this this didn't look good you know maybe if this you can add a note if people so it really automates the whole process for approvals and so you don't have to go back for the emailing and also eliminates any you know room for error as far as notifications when we deploy the solution we can have you know automatic ones for 30 60 or 90 days or there's custom once you want to add otherwise you know not every contract is the same if you want to be notified a little bit earlier or there's some other timeframe you want to be notified for if you want to be you know maybe it's like a lease term or something for a building you want to be able to you know receive a notification six months out you can do that here you know who should receive the notification you can enter that here and then what's the reason that they need to look into this it'll receive an email notification that they need to look into this so that way they'll stay on top of it also of course we have note so you want to keep that in here we have a renewal as well but that's going to do is take all that information from the contract details and plug it in you can add new dates to it so that way you don't have to recreate the whole contract it's kind of taking all the information automating the whole process for you of course history here if you wanted to recount something that might have happened or something that somebody had done in the contract you can easily see died right here as well so I'm gonna go ahead and go into the vendor area kind of similar concept here as the contracts of course we have filtering capabilities if you're looking for you know vendors in a certain area or maybe a type of vendor that they might be so type of service you can do that and then also of course we have the searching function here as well to easily find a find a vendor there pretty easily so I'll go into the vendors who can kind of see what that looks like you can capture all the details phone number email address who the the vendor owners might be purpose of this they get notifications so you know here for example in the documents area you can store things in here like the insurance document so that way you know when their insurance documents can ready to expire you know that they might need a new one so they'll get notification that that's getting ready to expire so if you wanted to edit this you know maybe needs to be notification needs to be given and that's when it's gonna expire you save that and then you can also see the contacts in here and then see all the contracts associated with that vendor on the topic of automation you know sometimes automation just means that you know you're not physically you know doing the work and everything so we actually have what's called you know our vendor portal where it's an external site where you can provide access to one of your vendors or your customers where they can actually see documents that you provide to them they can also upload documents which will come here in the system they can question years and quite a few other features actually so as soon as you provide their email address right here you'll hit the send vendor invitation and what that'll do is they'll send the vendor in this case a login so they can access that external site so if I go in here in documents we have the ability to make documents visible to that third party so now this document which is security office 365 is visible to them through an external portal so we can save that and then it would appear in our external portal you can also have them fill out question years we have questionnaire templates that you can generate but if you wanted to you know add a question here that you've already made you simply just click that and then you got it seldom when it might be due by so you'd say that and now the vendor it receives a notification that they hey they need to fill out this question you're in their external site so I'll jump into that really quick this is the an example at the external portal this is where the vendor might log in to to kind of see you know documents that might be expiring pending questions from you all their details they can fill out their vendor profile so you don't have to so they can fill out the vendor you know details so that way you don't have to manually do it yourself in the documents area this is where they're able to view all documents that they wanted to add a document that simply just click this arrange your system questionnaires so they can come in here fill out questionnaires they can answer the questions themselves like you know and based on the questions the answer they can upload certain documents all kinds of capabilities they can save is giraffe if they're not ready to send it otherwise if when they submit it they'll go right into their area here than the contract management so that provides automation so it's basically handing off all that work to basically you know the customer so they can kind of you know fill the profiles answer any questions and it's all it's all automated so you don't have to do it also we have scorecard capabilities you know of course this is important for making sure that you're kind of dealing with the best vendors and make sure that they're kind of holding up their end of the bargain if you will on delivery times and price and everything else so here you can actually see all the scorecards where you'll be rating the vendor they can be done quarterly they can do be done you know semi-annually or annually and you can generate these scorecards yourself but showing example what a scorecard actually looks like in our system here so this is an example of what the scorecard looks like so you can you know it can be reviewed on financial performance relationship it gives them a total score here you give them a star rating and it gets the averages that can be weighted also you can you know handwriting notes over here on the side as well so you know for pricing says 2 to 3 times didn't deliver on scheduled date range so you can add notes in here and then what you can do is actually utilize this to compare you know here over year if you'd like and so if you go to history you can see how they're actually doing so this is the current score and this is how things have changed and it gives you year-over-year what they've done so you can kind of keep on track now this particular vendor they've you know prices done up a little bit looks like or the role or rating has decreased point five points so a great way to be able to you know stay on top of your vendors as well we'll have reporting capabilities that's how it's important of course we have our canned reporting functionality here so if you wanted to have you know something on scorecard or if you're looking for maybe like the best a vendor for asset management you could you know do that and see who has the best score that's something you can do there's expiring reports all of these reports can be exported to CSV or Excel we also have power bi capabilities we can linked out you know power bi reports for you during deployment as well and in the settings tab because you kind of the autonomy to be able to control a lot of the parts in here so what you want to display may be contract types locations you can generate question years in here generate scorecards you can generate the workflows that we talked about for approval very easily actually the permission groups so all kinds of settings so don't want to go too far into it if you would like to book it down and discuss some of the customizations that we might be able to do for you be happy to discuss you log on to my dock 365.com book a demo that way or you can simply email me at been at my dock 365.com so without further ado I'll go ahead and hand it over to Quinton to go ahead and wrap everything up thanks so much for your time so thank you for that Ben I think that about wraps everything up that should be everything that we're going to be talking about today I'm but thank all of you for coming out to this webinar if you're interested in learning more about docks contract management system or any of our other SharePoint productivity solutions feel free to reach out to Bend and schedule a time to talk with him he'd love to answer any questions that you may have and further explore the different ways that our CMS can benefit you so thank you very much and have a great day [Music] you