AI and automation bring renewed precision and promptness to contract management workflows. They remove bottlenecks from the pre-execution contract lifecycle to speed up cycle times, reduce risks, ensure compliance, and boost the customer experience. Contracts that took weeks and months to finalize can now be completed in a fraction of the time.
At HyperStart, we harness the power of AI and automation to transform your contract management workflows, delivering value at every contracting step. This blog covers what they are, the benefits of automating them, and the steps to automating them.
What is an Automated Contract Management Workflow?
Automated contract workflow management helps streamline contract drafting, internal approvals, negotiations, and signing. It eliminates manual repetitive tasks that often lead to human error. This precision is crucial in the legal domain where even minor errors bear significant repercussions.
This boosts turnaround times and empowers you to seize business opportunities faster, giving you an edge in the market. A contract workflow automation solution is best when it offers both efficiency and intelligence to legal teams.
The Cost of Manual Contract Management Workflows
The time-intensive nature of contract workflows costs the company time, money, and resources. Sometimes underestimated, these costs impact both the company’s efficiency and bottom line.
A World Commerce and Contracting report notes that over the past two years, there has been a 13% increase in the average contract lifecycle’s time to reach signature. This is because of manual drafting, reviewing, and negotiation phases that are bottlenecked and error-prone. Longer contract TAT causes missed opportunities and slows the company’s ability to respond to market demands.
Another KPMG report indicates that human error leads to an average loss of 9.2% of an organization’s annual revenue. Non-compliance alone can result in 12% of total revenue. Missed terms and incorrect clauses jeopardize deals that result in legal disputes and financial penalties.
What are the Components of a Contract Management Workflow
Draft: Create an agreement with a standard contract template and pre-approved clauses.
Approve: Secure internal no-code workflows from relevant stakeholders.
Negotiate: Negotiate and AI-redline with the counterparty.
Sign: Electronically sign and finalize the contract.
Track: Monitor contract obligations, renewals, dates, and contract performance.
How do Automated Contract Workflows Benefit Businesses?
AI-powered automation in contract management workflows ushers in a new era, unlocking a minefield of opportunities for legal teams and businesses at large. Here are the top benefits:
1. Eradicate Risk
Manual data entry and rote work are mistake-prone. HyperStart is a contract management software that automates these processes and guards you from contract errors. Pre-approved templates and clauses ensure consistency and compliance, minimizing legal risks to the company.
2. Close Deals Faster
Gone are the days when contract turnaround times took so long they became too irrelevant to execute by the time the pen reached the signing stage. Automated contractual workflows help contracts zip through the contract management process, accelerating deal closure.
3. Unleash Efficiency
Repetitive tasks and multiple minor contract requests bog down legal teams. Contract workflow automation frees up their time to focus on high-impact work like negotiations, strategic business expansion, creativity, and legal advice.
4. Slash Costs
Manual contract workflows devour both time and money. Automation can cause significant cost reductions that allow you to invest in other areas of your legal career.
5. Compliance Made Easy
With an arsenal of secure pre-approved templates and clauses, you can make sure you adhere to legal requirements, simplifying compliance standards and eliminating expensive legal fiascos.
6. Delight Your Clients
Having a frictionless workflow for contract management processes breeds positive relationships. This eliminates delays and frustrations associated with manual workflows. Faster, more transparent experiences for clients make it a win-win for everyone involved.
Experience Flawless Contract Automation
HyperStart CLM brings you AI-powered automation to help you streamline your contract processes. Get started today.
Steps to Automate Your Contract Workflow Process with HyperStart
With hundreds and thousands of contracts in motion like client agreements, procurement, and vendor contracts, every contracting set is likely to be bottlenecked. An optimal contract automation solution recognizes and solves the most frustrating parts of the contract lifecycle. Here’s how we automate contract workflows at HyperStart:
1. Round Up Your Team
The first step to contract management workflow automation is identifying distinct roles within your organization. This could include legal team members and department heads in sales, procurement, HR, finance, or project management. Approvers on HyperStart can be assigned as default approvers or ad-hoc approvers.
Specify who owns contract templates, creates them, approves them before they are sent for signing, negotiates them, and signs on them. Ensure that they know who tracks and manages renewals and obligations post-execution.
2. Chart the Contracting Course
Automated contract management workflows are optimized for speed and compliance from contract creation to completion and commitment. This stage identifies bottlenecks at each stage. You can configure workflows with custom contract types and terms. Smart fields and tags can automatically populate data to streamline contract creation.
3. Automate at Every Mundane Step
Setting up automated workflows saves several days’ of contracting time. You can create these workflows no-code or get your CLM partner to automate them. On HyperStart, intuitive in-take forms can kick off workflows accelerating your contract creation speed to ~ 2 minutes and enabling you to close contracts 10x faster.
Draft: Standardization in templates and clauses ensures consistency, accuracy, and data integrity across business teams. Dynamic data tagging and a browser-native Word editor are also handy tools so everyone is on the same page on all the important things.
Approve: No-code workflows with version control and audit trails to debug the history of a pre-executed contract and replace Word, Google Docs, and Email.
Negotiate: Role-based stakeholder access helps lock legal content to keep it from errors or risks. AI-redlining on a browser’s native editor further replaces manual contract monitoring and version control.
4. Ditch the Signature Chase
Integrations with e-signature software make legally binding and compliant signatures frictionless. Other options like hand-drawn or OTP-based signing options that are also compliant can also be used for signatures. This eliminates printing, signing, scanning, and wet-ink signatures and allows you to sign contracts quickly on any device.
Signing integrations can be coupled with other automations like:
Signing waterfalls ensuring the right person has the pen and the right time
Automated reminder alerts to prompt signatories
Batch process signing for high-volume contracts rolled out in bulk
5. Never Miss a Renewal Again
Stay ahead of schedule with automated renewal tracking. AI-powered extraction of key contract terms improves traceability and visibility. Save and track key terms on dashboards and analytics to identify and flag potential risks and obligations. A proactive workflow for contract management is crucial to avoid potential lapses in obligations.
6. Track at Every Contracting Turn
The in-flight dashboard is like a real-time map of all your in-progress contract workflows. They offer valuable insights into the status of your contracts. Every ongoing contract can be tracked from creation to completion with key metrics like review time, number of turns, and current turn. This optimizes the workflow before signing contracts to move the business forward faster.
HyperStart actively streamlines contract management workflows with powerful automations. It enables you to think more clearly as you focus on client negotiations. It also allows you to develop greater depth in every deal, providing more opportunities for thoughtful responses. Experience smoother, faster, and more successful contracting today.
Before You Implement
Thorough testing of workflows is crucial to spotting any issues or inefficiencies that need to be addressed. Here’s how HyperStart empowers you to rigorously test and refine your workflows:
Test drive first: This focused group tests the workflow with a limited number of contracts to spot potential glitches and areas for improvement.
Gather feedback: We’re all ears for honest feedback to further optimize to meet everyone’s needs.
Rollout full–scale: When you’ve seen the contract management workflow in action, we prepare for a full-scale test. This implementation also tests broader issues in a real-world setting.
The final touch: The full-blown setup offers more data for further refinement. HyperStart goes the extra mile to make necessary adjustments so you can reach a positive ROI quicker.
Empower your team: Even the niftiest of tools fail if no one uses them. While the workflow UI is intuitive and helps you get started in minutes, we are keen on an ironclad plan of adoption across your whole business. Our training is structured and effective, and the support team is happy to help anytime.
Final Thoughts
The future of contract workflows is automation. It empowers you to lead with value regardless of your industry. At HyperStart, we envision a future where managing contracts is effortless and efficient. Our mission is to pioneer innovative solutions that transform contract lifecycle management with powerful automations and intelligence so you can thrive in a digital-first world with confidence. We’re continually shipping new automations to outdo ourselves. See for yourself.
Experience Flawless Contract Automation
HyperStart CLM brings you AI-powered automation to help you streamline your contract processes. Get started today.
