Alice Alfano
Modern Procurement Problems Require Modern Contract Solutions
So many departments, including legal, sales, finance, and others, rely on procurement to get what they need and fast. When an agreement takes a long time to complete, thereby delaying the receipt of a critical piece of equipment or business service, it doesn’t just affect procurement’s bottom line. It affects the departments that need the equipment or service to conduct essential business. Procurement’s performance sets the stage for everyone else’s too.
Despite its crucial role, an IACCM survey suggests that procurement groups face a unique array of challenges. Here are the results:
35% said that assessing and reporting risk is proving to be very difficult
Procurement, since it is connected to all other areas of business, needs to be able to track risk in agreements and ensure contracts follow a standardized flow.
One of the biggest challenges procurement faces comes from third-party paper. Unlike sell-side contracts, the buy-side almost exclusively uses external party paper. These third-party agreements may contain terms and conditions that are non-preferred, opening up areas of contract risk for your organization.
A modern contracting solution enables the management of third-party paper so that agreements can be reviewed, modified, approved, and executed with the click of a mouse or the tap of a phone. And with all that visibility, it is much easier for procurement to see where a contract is in its workflow and make sure that non-preferred terms don’t accidentally sneak in.
32% said searching for specific clauses or terms is proving to be very difficult
Let’s be real here. Procurement often gets a reputation of being slower, but the reasons for this are complex and often tied to systems that don’t facilitate faster contracting cycles outside their control. Procurement often wrestles with managing external party paper, non-preferred terms, poor contract visibility, and lack of automation.
A modern contract management solution can work for procurement and overcome these challenges. When dealing with third-party paper, an AI-powered solution is critical for making sure that contract terms don’t introduce unwanted risk. And being able to easily search your contracts is essential for understanding what you’ve committed to, saving your sanity in the process.
22% said finding the current executed contract is proving to be very difficult
If the average consumer can easily search and find anything on Google, then why doesn’t Procurement enjoy the same streamlined experience when searching their contracts? The answer is that now they can.
With a solution, like Malbek, finding contract data is as easy as typing in a phrase and hitting search. Even third-party paper is cataloged and tagged with important phrases and metadata, so you can find the contract information you need, navigating status and terms easily. You can also filter your contracts by category, much like you might do when shopping online with Amazon. No more building complex reports just to find the one contract that you need.
Modern problems require modern solutions and procurement’s day-to-day challenges are no exception. The challenges with tracking risk, searching for specific clauses, and finding current contracts are all issues that a modern contract management solution, like Malbek, can do so procurement can work smarter, and not harder. By keeping unfamiliar terms flagged, clauses tagged, and contracts tracked, procurement can get back to what matters most: getting all parts of your organization what they need.
