Most Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutions are narrowly focused with inflexible architecture.
However, market factors require strategies to help reduce risk, ensure compliance and support the changing nature of organisational work procedures, relating to the management of procurement and contract management activities.
Nimblex solves these problems with our end-to-end Procurement and Contract Management Solution.
In the past, organisations took different approaches to contract management based on the fact that IT would drive the requirements and procurement of a new CLM solution.
This created several disparate and disjointed, siloed solutions due to IT taking the easy off-the-shelf approach, only to discover that the solution cannot be configured to fit the organisations needs, as per the vendors empty promises.
Many software providers focus on CLM features and functionality based on their intended audiences. For instance, SharePoint providers would offer CLM to IT as part of a wider application deployment for content management. In other cases, it was about a CLM add-on to an existing solution, such as an ERP Platform, like SAP or Oracle. This covered the use cases needed to enable the ERP, but did not serve contract managers or other stakeholders adequately.
Regardless of the solution approach, the every-day user is often absent from the conversation. In fact, one of the main failures of traditional CLM was the lack of buy-in or adoption by users.
Consequently, these siloed CLM Solutions caused a misfit between what was required for the organisation (as per their procurement policy) and the many input screens and non-relevant data input boxes of off-the-shelf CLM solutions. These solutions lacked the ability to morph and alter shape, to keep up with the changes to policies, user requirements and business improvement initiatives.
What’s driving the need for flexible CLM?
Today, Enterprise Contract Lifecycle Management (ECLM) is driven by the increased focus on compliance and risk. Business dynamics demanding contract consistency and visibility is another driver. Senior Procurement Managers no longer wish to put their fate in the hands of IT Managers, to avoid the tail wagging the dog scenarios.
This is why the traditional ‘cookie cut’ CLM software is no longer the tool of choice and flawed with costs, risks and user disappointments.
The movement of social, mobile and cloud technology fuels an information explosion. The incorporation of this information into decision making is impacting the wider corporate view of what CLM has been in the past, and what it needs to be in the future.
As a provider to leading private and public sector clients, we are increasingly seeing the need for CLM software which offers unprecedented flexibility, actionable insights, configurable architecture, trackable decision making, easier compliance management and shorter approval times. These features will better align with an organisations particular procurement policy or framework. The overall objective is no longer to implement a particular CLM software product. No, the key objective is now to implement and automate an organisations unique procurement and contract management policy successfully. This includes individual workflow nuances, intelligent report views, intuitive business rules, etc. Needless to say that these requirements would be different for each and every organisation.
