Manual drafting processes, disparate document and contract storage, and workflow orchestrated by email and telephone contact can lead to contract lifecycle bottlenecks, wasted time and squandered opportunities. 

Procurement specialists, legal counsel, paralegals, executive assistants and other higher education professionals struggle to manage contracts effectively due to out-dated contract management procedures. 

Contract management software can alleviate these issues so that education professionals can take control of their contracts and ensure contract management best practice.

Similarly, manually drafting contract documents every time a contract is being prepared involves searching and pulling essential parts out of a cluster of documents and manually drafting the rest, often resulting in the accidental exclusion of necessary terms and, consequently a contract held up in review.

Contract management templates and clauses

Contract templates provided by leading contract management software make contract authoring easy, replacing the manual drafting process for streamlined contract creation and approval.  With a system that creates your organisation’s contract from a template, your team has a clear starting point for the drafting of a new contract. System users can configure their own system to pull desired terms and clauses based on the type of contract they wish to create, ensuring that all necessary terms are incorporated.  So, using leading contract management software means that you can reduce bottlenecks, and you can complete your contracts more quickly.

Manual contract storage

Too many organisations continue to rely on ineffective manual approaches to contract storage, such as those involving emails, paper documentation and disorganised digital storage.  Such methods make it all but impossible to maintain contract security, version control, adherence to key dates, awareness of milestones and the ability to improve contract performance. Storing contracts may seem easy enough.  However, in the absence of a centralised contract repository, higher-ed contract managers are missing an opportunity to reduce risk, to maintain control of their contracts and enhance contract performance.

Contract management software provides a secure repository

Organisations need a central contract repository to store contracts and obtain the most from them.  Contract management software offers a cloud-based repository for secure contract storage, allowing contract management professionals to organise their contracts, exercise document version control, search for legacy contracts, track approval statuses, collaborate and more.

The challenges of manual contract workflow

Education contract management teams employing manual workflow procedures suffer if one person misses reminders, renewal dates, payments or other important workflow tasks.  Far too many schools and higher education institutions have no workflow process at all.  Communication relating to contracts and negotiations that occurs using emails and phones can result in contract lifecycle bottlenecks, missed steps and key dates, wasted time and financial losses. 

Automated workflows with contract management software

Organisations that leverage trusted contract management software for workflow automation can reduce contract lifecycle delays by appointing the right people with unlimited contract notifications, task reminders, and automated alerts.  Intelligent workflow automation helps contract management teams to leverage contract process management, user-defined fields, audit trails, reporting and analytics etc. Contract negotiation and approvals can be overseen with workflows that track all stages of the contract lifecycle.  Contract management personnel can meet key dates and milestones, including contract renewals, with automatic alerts.  Furthermore, audit trail history logged by reputable contract management software provides teams with an up-to-date record of changes made to a contract.

Education contract management software

Professionals in schools, universities and colleges to can excel at education contract management with Contract Insight from Four.  Contract Insight^® is an advanced contract lifecycle management software backed by AI that allows you to manage, track and draft contracts faster, and automate and streamline the entire contract lifecycle with flexible features such as contract authoring, workflow and version tracking.  Supercharge your contract lifecycle management methods now with a free demo of leading, AI powered cloud-based software from Four Business Solutions.

About Four 

Four helps small and multi-national organisations enrich the way they work. From supply chain to procurement and contract management, we have decades of experience helping companies forge ahead in the global market. 

John O’Brien is the CEO at Four Business Solutions, global business consultants and software integrators providing business processes improvements in Finance, Supply Chain and Operations, across a broad range of industries.