Contract management – identifying needs with checklists

Before in­tro­du­cing con­tract man­age­ment soft­ware, ana­lys­is is needed to answer three basic ques­tions:

• Actual state: How does our con­tract man­age­ment cur­rently work and what prob­lems occur?
• Target state: What would we like to improve by in­tro­du­cing a con­tract man­age­ment solu­tion?
• Or­gan­isa­tion: Do we need to make changes to the or­gan­isa­tion of our con­tract man­age­ment in order to achieve the target state?

An­swer­ing the ques­tions in detail will help you to de­term­ine your needs in a further step. The aim of the needs as­sess­ment is for you to be able to name which tech­nic­al solu­tion makes sense and which soft­ware fea­tures you cannot do without.

Check­lists – food for thought for the needs as­sess­ment.
Check­lists help you to de­term­ine your needs. The check­list we offer for down­load will give you food for thought. By working with the check­list, you do not get a con­crete shop­ping list, but clarity about which tech­nic­al pos­sib­il­it­ies exist and which of these pos­sib­il­it­ies help you to improve your con­tract man­age­ment.

Through the check­list you clarify very basic things such as whether you prefer an on-premises or a cloud solu­tion. De­tailed ques­tions are also cla­ri­fied: Do you need in­ter­faces to already ex­ist­ing systems (e.g. to ERP soft­ware or to a central user dir­ect­ory)? And to what extent should con­tract man­age­ment be used at all – only by one or­gan­isa­tion­al unit or along the entire value chain? This also leads to answers to the ques­tions about user numbers and the number of con­tracts or the monthly in­crease in con­tracts.

These ques­tions should be cla­ri­fied before the initial contact with a pro­vider so that you get the maximum benefit from the con­sulta­tion. Well pre­pared, you will quickly find out whether the pro­vider’s solu­tion fits your re­quire­ments.

Con­tract Man­age­ment – Check­list for Needs As­sess­ment

You want to in­tro­duce con­tract man­age­ment soft­ware? To get a first im­pres­sion of what your needs are, this check­list will help you.

1. System scope
To es­tim­ate what the scale of the project is, the fol­low­ing check­list ques­tions will help you:

• How many con­tracts are there in the company that are to be ad­min­istered with the system?
• How many ad­di­tion­al con­tracts will be added to the system per year?
• Which/how many or­gan­isa­tion­al units are to be in­teg­rated?
• How many em­ploy­ees are to work with the system?
• Should the system be con­nec­ted to ex­ist­ing soft­ware/dir­ect­or­ies (e.g. in­ter­face to ERP or an in­tern­al central user dir­ect­ory such as Windows Active Dir­ect­ory)?
• Should the system be rolled out in­ter­na­tion­ally?

2. In­di­vidu­al­is­ab­il­ity of the system.
You have already de­veloped pro­cesses and struc­tures that dictate how con­tracts are managed at your company or you would like to in­tro­duce new pro­cesses/struc­tures? Then it makes sense to think about whether the new con­tract man­age­ment soft­ware should map (sub)pro­cesses or struc­tures.

• Do you want to map work­flows (e.g. for con­tract ap­prov­al) with the soft­ware?
• Do you require col­lab­or­a­tion func­tions (e.g. the pos­sib­il­ity for users to ask each other ques­tions about a con­tract file or to comment on notes)?
• Should your cor­por­ate ter­min­o­logy be adopted in the soft­ware (e.g. the naming of con­tract types or or­gan­isa­tion­al units)?
• Is there an au­thor­isa­tion concept in the ex­ist­ing (ana­logue) con­tract man­age­ment and should this be adopted?
• Is a rights control ne­ces­sary, which is set up de­pend­ing on the or­gan­isa­tion­al units?
• Do you need tech­nic­al ex­ten­sions of the system? Tech­nic­al ex­ten­sions are e.g. ad­di­tion­al digital files and work­flows with which you or­gan­ise the pro­cesses related to con­tracts (example: a project file in which all con­tracts are col­lec­ted, re­gard­less of the con­tract type, which were con­cluded for a spe­cif­ic project).
• What master data and metadata should the soft­ware manage? In ad­di­tion to the stand­ard fields, should ad­di­tion­al fields be created for spe­cif­ic con­tract types in order to in­di­vidu­al­ise the master data and metadata man­age­ment?
• Do you rather need a “digital re­pos­it­ory” with search func­tion or is a con­sist­ent struc­ture im­port­ant (can be sup­por­ted e.g. by the uniform cre­ation of op­tion­al and man­dat­ory fields)?
• Do you want to de­term­ine the struc­ture within the digital con­tract file (doc­u­ment cat­egor­ies) your­self?
• Do you want to migrate legacy data and/or doc­u­ments from an ex­ist­ing system or from Excel and dir­ect­or­ies?

3. Fea­tures
What fea­tures do you need? Are there func­tions you cannot do without? And what is “nice to have” but not a knock-out cri­terion?

• How should dead­lines be mon­itored? Who should be warned when dead­lines expire? By which means of com­mu­nic­a­tion should warn­ings be sent (e.g. by e-mail and within the system)? What should happen if the person being warned does not react?
• Do you need a tem­plate system to create con­tracts? Should the tem­plate system be linked to a clause man­age­ment system?
• Should created doc­u­ments be ver­sioned and go through an ap­prov­al process?
• Do you need an audit-proof archive?
• What search func­tions do you need? Should con­tract doc­u­ments be search­able via full text in­dex­ing?
• Do you want to assign e-mails and at­tach­ments dir­ectly from Outlook to ex­ist­ing con­tract files?
• Do you need a func­tion to assign file notes and con­tract cor­res­pond­ence to the digital con­tract file?
• How complex do you want your re­port­ing to be? Are simple se­lec­tion lists suf­fi­cient (e.g. number of con­tracts of a certain con­tract type from the year 2016) or should the system perform and visu­al­ise more ex­tens­ive arith­met­ic op­er­a­tions (e.g. project li­ab­il­it­ies from con­tracts into the future)?
• Should the re­port­ing results be ex­por­ted (to Excel)?

4. Op­er­a­tion of the system

• Is it im­port­ant to you that your data resides on your company server (on-premises)
• Can you benefit from the ad­vant­ages of a cloud solu­tion?
• Are there any spe­cific­a­tions in your company that re­strict the pos­sib­il­ity of using cloud com­put­ing?
• Is a com­bin­a­tion of soft­ware pur­chase and op­er­a­tion in the data centre in­ter­est­ing for you?