The objectives of contract management are simple > maximise profit, ensure you get what you pay for and mitigate risk.
The problem is that companies haven’t equipped themselves to deal with the level of complexity that is inherent in many of these contracts. Indeed, IBM has found that nine times more data was created in 2015 and 2016 than in the previous 100 years combined! For high value contracts, the total obligations required to be actively managed exceeds well over 5,000. Notwithstanding this, companies continue to rely on tools and processes that predate that time – most notably, companies are still relying on PDF versions of their contracts (a format invented in 1993 for the express purpose of making documents static!)
This complexity, coupled with the static nature of the documents results in a situation whereby organisations have adopted numerous tools, AI-technologies, etc., to identify and extract bits of data to inform the basis of their compliance. Even then though, that exercise typically doesn’t go far enough as the data points that they are extracting almost exclusively focus on calendar tasks (i.e. “The Contractor must submit a Quarterly report…”). Is it a good starting point? Yes. Is it sufficient? Absolutely not.
Even when excluding tasks which are so obvious that they don’t need to be actively managed, calendar tasks constitute only 20% of the obligations that need to be actively managed. The remaining 80% are event driven tasks.
Failing to comply with these can be catastrophic and yet all too often, they are not adequately identified and managed.
Affinitext’s Compliance solutions (Task Finder, Task Manager and Tasking as a Service offering) take the pain out of compliance. Enjoy real time oversight, streamlined auditable compliance driven from the clause, and comfort knowing the all of your key tasks have been identified and managed – not just the 20%!
If you work with high value contracts, we can help.