7 Ways Intelligent Technology Benefits Procurement Teams
With modern advances in procurement technology, it’s time for teams to develop a strategy for adopting new tools and processes. Smart teams will take a step back and examine the ways new solutions can impact their workflow and build a holistic stack that combines complementary tools and shares information across systems. Cutting-edge innovations like DocuSign Agreement Cloud for Procurement will increase the efficiency of routine day-to-day work while providing additional benefits for internal and external stakeholders who work with procurement.
Below is a list of some of the ways that modern innovation can benefit from the smart technology in DocuSign Insight. As you read through, consider the way your team currently manages these aspects of your workflow. Also consider the time and money that would be saved by upgrading your procurement system and what other projects you could complete with those additional resources.
Central access to data
A modern procurement workflow eliminates time wasted searching for contracts, entering data, validating contract information and coordinating contract management activities (renewals, portfolio analysis, etc.). Cutting-edge tools will maximize the time procurement professionals can spend adding a human touch to their work by streamlining mundane parts of their workflow and putting relevant information at their fingertips.
Rapid response to inquiries
With all agreements accessible in one place, searches can be performed with agility, accuracy and speed. A smart, agile procurement workflow offers the ability to easily query a broad base of contracts for specific terms and clauses, an organization can adapt quickly to dynamic business needs. This is useful for responding to regulatory changes, informing new contract negotiations and addressing any unforeseen disruptions.
New cost savings
Contracts are full of clauses and terms containing details about discounts or rebates that may occur later if certain conditions are met. These savings can be easy to overlook as agreements age and organizations typically leave money on the table due to the challenge of tracking such terms. With centralized agreement storage and a broader base of documents to analyze, an intelligent system of agreement can be trained to find those savings automatically.
Risk identification
Analyzing volumes of contracts manually is extremely time-intensive and leaves substantial room for mistakes. With a smart agreement analysis tool, the technology can be trained to identify risks of business exposure and issues in an organization’s portfolio based on knowledge of the contract system.
Value creation opportunities
There are plenty of opportunities in your agreement language to create new value for an organization. For example, companies frequently write rebate or discount conditions into contracts and forget to follow up when those conditions are met. An intelligent contract system is the easiest and most accurate way to search a contract base and identify opportunities like that. It’s also the fastest means of analyzing potential issues in complex agreements like a merger/acquisition or divestiture event. Smart contracting tools can also ensure clarity and consistency throughout an agreement and uncover problematic provisions that are inconsistent with standard contractual templates.
Agreement analytics
There’s a large volume of structured and unstructured data in your contract repository that can be useful in analyzing the effectiveness of those agreements. This data is an excellent way to improve contract processes and communicate about the effectiveness of agreement work to executives and other leaders in an organization. Ideally, the analytics engine will work on top of existing agreement tools to assist with discovery, risk analysis and more.
Extract information
Organizations need to be able to comb through libraries of agreements to extract important terms, pricing, delivery obligations, payment terms, renewal clauses and product/service performance SLAs. Intelligent search capabilities can also be trained to uncover provisions such as automatic renewals, indemnification specifics around breach events, protection for global events across the supply chain, dynamic pricing structures and more.
To learn more about today’s procurement challenges and find out how to solve them with DocuSign Insight, download Smart Solutions for Agile Procurement. It’s full of details about how groundbreaking new technology can be built into procurement workflows to make that team a strategic driver of any business.