CLM offers very powerful contract generation capabilities. Contract documents (Microsoft word based documents) can be created automatically based on standard templates approved by your legal department. As long as your system is setup with predefined set of approved clauses, sections and templates you can quickly create contract documents, get stakeholders approval and publish to the suppliers for negotiations. In this blog, I would like to highlight some very interesting but often overlooked functionalities in contract generation area which you can take advantage of:-
Are you running an RFx event and wondering how you can already start reviewing contract legal terms & conditions (t&c) with suppliers and automatically bring in agreed upon t&c from selected supplier into the legal contract document ? Below are the steps you can follow to achieve it -
- Create “Contract Clause” type of question in RFx
- In this question, select the approved clause from clause library which you would like to review with suppliers. Supplier can either Agree or Disagree with the text of the clause
- If supplier agrees then clause would be automatically available when you create legal contract document (.docx) from selected supplier.
Note that only 1 clause can be associated with 1 “Contract Clause” type question so if you would like to review multiple clauses you would need that many “Contract Clause” type questions in RFx.
Are you wondering how to bring in RFx Question responses to Legal contract document automatically? Yes, you can automatically bring in table based, yes/no, multiple choice or even attachment type of question response from suppliers directly into the contract document (.docx). Below are the steps you can follow to achieve it -
- Create a contract variable (token) in contract variable library
- Decide which RFx question response you would like to have in legal contract document
- In RFx, every question type has a field “Clause Variable” , Select variable created in steps above to corresponding question. Make sure the variable is included in the clause document where the question response needs to be captured
- Create contract document by selecting an appropriate contract template which has a clause document used in the above step. You should see the response available in the document if everything was setup correctly.
During contract negotiation, updates may happen in the contract document or even in the master agreement, how would you make sure that the agreement and contract document are in sync? It can be done easily using the steps below -
- Go to a contract document in picture and click on Actions menu
- Select action “Synchronize with Agreement” for synchronizing latest updates from suppliers on contract document to master agreement.
- Select action “Synchronize Data with New Document Version” for synchronizing updates in master agreement to new version of contract document
Would you like to delete all contract document versions prior to the latest one that is in the “Executed” phase? Yes through scripting you can purge contract documents unwanted versions -
- Go through the reference iAPI guide provided with the CLM solution
- Look for details on Purge function and it’s usage
Do you know CLM supports standalone script that can be executed on a designated schedule? Let’s say you would like to run a script that runs every night and checks if any contract document or agreements are past expiration and if they are past expiration, change the status to ‘Expired’ -
- Go to the setup and look for a link ‘Explicitly called Scripts’
- Create a new script as you desire and associate it with a scheduled task by mentioning specific timeframe.
Is your company using barcodes in the contract documents? Yes, you can make a barcode out of any meta-data field such as contract id, agreement name or supplier name in agreement and automatically insert that to a contract document in CLM -
- When you create a contract variable (or token) to represent a field in the agreement, select checkbox ‘Replace with barcode value”
- Include this variable in the clause document for e.g. Header clause which will used as a header text of the contract document
- At the time contract document generation, if above clause is used then you would see the barcode. CLM supports Code 39 barcode fonts.
Hope you find above information useful. Feel free to comment and let me know if you need more details on these functionalities.
