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Wal-Mart issuing a Zero Tolerance policy for suppliers subcontracting work or Tesco severing ties with its horsemeat supplier highlights the significance of contract governance. The global nature of supply chain has made conducting business a very complex task for organizations.

Organizations have long used contracts to conduct business. It provides the framework within which the organization carries out activities and tries to mitigate risks. With tight regulatory norms, a well defined and well managed contracting process is the need of the hour.

However, more often than not, procurement professionals give more weightage to finding out suppliers and negotiating the terms & conditions as compared to effectively managing the contracts. Once a contract is signed it is often left forgotten in the organization data.

Manual ways for creating and managing contracts often overlooks standard terms & conditions and also result in time delays. The need of the hour is to manage contracts across its various stages, right from drafting the contract to implementing it to renewal.

An efficient contract management ensures improved relationship with suppliers which in turn offers competitive advantage to the organization and thus improves the shareholder value. However a contract that is kept locked in office drawers may result in something unfortunate like a scandal or cost the organization millions of dollars if a contract is renewed without evaluating the supplier.

In this blog series we will attempt to highlight the challenges associated with traditional decentralized paper based approach for maintaining contracts and how best these challenges can be addressed.

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