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Improve Your Contract Management

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Improve Your Contract Management
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Optimize Your Icertis Contract Management for Enhanced Compliance

Complex approval workflows and compliance challenges can often slow down critical processes. Our platform helps you pinpoint exact bottlenecks and streamline reviews. Improve overall governance and transform your lifecycle from initiation to termination.

Download our pre-configured data template and address common challenges to reach your efficiency goals. Follow our six-step improvement plan and consult the Data Template Guide to transform your operations.

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Why Optimize Contract Management with Icertis?

Effective Contract Management is the backbone of successful business operations, especially when leveraging a sophisticated platform like Icertis Contract Intelligence. While Icertis provides robust capabilities for managing your contracts, the underlying processes can still harbor inefficiencies, leading to significant financial and operational costs. Unoptimized contract workflows can result in lengthy approval cycles, missed revenue opportunities, compliance risks, and strained relationships with counterparties. Understanding and refining these processes is crucial for maximizing your investment in Icertis and ensuring your contracts drive, rather than hinder, business objectives.

How Process Mining Supercharges Icertis Contract Management

Process mining offers an unparalleled, data-driven lens into your actual Contract Management processes within Icertis. Instead of relying on assumptions or anecdotal evidence, process mining analyzes event logs directly from your Icertis system to reconstruct every step taken in each contract's lifecycle. This allows you to visualize the true end-to-end flow, revealing hidden bottlenecks in review, approval, and negotiation stages. You can accurately measure actual contract cycle times, identify specific process deviations, and pinpoint exactly where delays occur. This objective insight is key to understanding how to reduce Contract Management cycle time and drive true process optimization across your organization.

Key Improvement Areas Discovered through Process Mining

By applying process mining to your Icertis Contract Management data, you uncover specific areas ripe for improvement. You might discover that certain departments or individual approvers consistently create bottlenecks in the internal review process, or that specific contract types always experience longer negotiation phases. The technology can highlight non-compliant activities, such as skipped mandatory legal reviews, or deviations from your standard operating procedures. Moreover, process mining allows you to analyze the efficiency of post-execution phases, like obligation monitoring, amendment processing, or renewal workflows. These insights provide concrete, actionable intelligence for streamlining operations and enhancing overall contract governance.

Realizing Tangible Outcomes: Benefits of Optimized Icertis Processes

The application of process mining to your Icertis Contract Management yields a host of tangible benefits. Expect a significant reduction in contract cycle times, accelerating your time-to-revenue and improving overall operational velocity. By eliminating bottlenecks and streamlining workflows, you will achieve substantial cost savings through reduced administrative overhead and fewer errors requiring costly rework. Enhanced compliance becomes a reality as process mining proactively identifies risks and ensures adherence to contractual obligations and internal policies. Furthermore, better governance, improved auditability, and stronger control over contract terms contribute to a more resilient and efficient contract ecosystem. These improvements transform your contract function into a strategic asset, directly impacting your bottom line.

Getting Started with Your Icertis Contract Process Optimization Journey

Embarking on your Contract Management process optimization journey with Icertis and process mining is a strategic move towards operational excellence. This data-driven approach empowers you to move beyond guesswork, providing clear, actionable insights into your most critical contract workflows. By leveraging the data already present in your Icertis system, you gain the clarity needed to make informed decisions, drive efficiency, and establish a best-in-class Contract Management function. Start exploring how process mining can unlock the full potential of your Icertis investment and lead to continuous improvement.

Contract Management Contract Lifecycle Management Contract Administration Legal Department Procurement Compliance Cycle Time Reduction Negotiation Optimization

Common Problems & Challenges

Identify which challenges are impacting you

Contracts often get stuck in lengthy approval queues, delaying execution and impacting revenue recognition. This extends the overall contract lifecycle, leading to missed opportunities and strained stakeholder relationships.
ProcessMind analyzes approval workflows within Icertis, pinpointing specific approvers, departments, or conditions causing delays. It visualizes the actual paths contracts take, identifying non-compliant approval sequences and areas for automation or streamlining.

Lengthy back-and-forth negotiations with counterparties can significantly delay contract execution, postponing revenue generation and increasing operational costs. Repeated revisions and unaddressed sticking points prolong the time to signature, negatively affecting business agility.
ProcessMind illuminates the negotiation phase in Icertis, revealing patterns of revisions, identifying specific clauses causing frequent redlining, and quantifying the impact of each negotiation round. This insight helps optimize negotiation strategies and template usage.

Deviations from established internal contract policies, such as skipping required review steps or obtaining approvals out of sequence, expose the organization to legal and financial risks. These non-compliant paths often go unnoticed, creating audit vulnerabilities and inconsistent contracting practices across departments.
ProcessMind automatically discovers all actual process variants within Icertis, highlighting every instance where a contract veers off the intended, compliant path. This allows for proactive identification and remediation of policy breaches.

Delays in managing contract renewals or terminations can lead to automatic rollovers of unfavorable terms, missed revenue from new contracts, or unnecessary continuation of services. This results in suboptimal contract portfolio management and potential financial losses for the organization.
ProcessMind tracks the entire lifecycle, identifying contracts approaching their expiration and visualizing the renewal or termination process. It highlights delays in these activities, ensuring timely action and improved governance.

Stakeholders often struggle to determine the real-time status of a contract, leading to frequent inquiries, communication overhead, and an inability to forecast deal closures accurately. This opacity hampers proactive management and decision-making throughout the contract lifecycle.
ProcessMind provides an objective, end-to-end view of every contract's journey in Icertis, from initiation to execution. It shows exactly where each contract is in the process, identifying stalled instances and providing data-driven insights into overall performance.

Frequent revisions and extensive redlining indicate inefficiencies in initial drafting or a lack of clarity in requirements, leading to wasted effort and prolonged contract cycle times. This rework consumes valuable legal and business resources, increasing operational costs unnecessarily.
ProcessMind analyzes the frequency and patterns of contract revision activities within Icertis, revealing root causes such as inconsistent templates or unclear initial instructions. It helps identify areas where standardization or clearer guidelines can reduce rework.

After a contract is signed, critical obligations, such as service delivery milestones or reporting requirements, can be overlooked, leading to penalties, damaged relationships, or failure to realize expected benefits. Without clear oversight, compliance risks remain high.
ProcessMind monitors the post-execution phase, including obligation monitoring and compliance review activities, identifying where these tasks are delayed or incomplete. It provides visibility into adherence to SLAs and other post-signature commitments in Icertis.

Bottlenecks often stem from an uneven distribution of workload among legal counsel or internal reviewers, leading to burnout for some and idle time for others. This inefficient resource allocation delays critical contract activities and prevents the optimal utilization of skilled personnel.
ProcessMind maps the workload and throughput of individual reviewers or departments during review activities within Icertis. It identifies bottlenecks caused by resource constraints, enabling data-driven rebalancing of tasks.

Uncontrolled use of non-standard contract templates or ad-hoc drafting practices introduces inconsistencies, increases legal risk, and complicates compliance monitoring. This leads to a fragmented contract portfolio and higher administrative burden.
While not directly an activity, ProcessMind can infer this by analyzing variations in contract drafting and subsequent revision activities. It reveals unusual process flows in Icertis that suggest non-standard approaches, highlighting areas where template adherence needs reinforcement.

Transitions between different teams or departments, such as from procurement to legal or legal to sales, frequently introduce delays and communication gaps in the contract process. These hand-off points become hidden bottlenecks, increasing overall cycle time and frustrating stakeholders.
ProcessMind visualizes the flow of contracts across different departments and contract owners in Icertis, highlighting exactly where delays occur during transitions between activities. This uncovers inefficiencies in cross-functional collaboration.

Without a clear understanding of actual process times and bottlenecks, predicting when a contract will be executed becomes challenging. Inaccurate forecasts can disrupt financial planning, sales projections, and project timelines, leading to missed targets and poor strategic decisions.
ProcessMind analyzes historical data of contract execution activities, identifying average cycle times and predicting future completion dates based on current process state in Icertis. This provides reliable, data-driven forecasting capabilities.

Typical Goals

Define what success looks like

Shorter approval times directly translate to faster deal closures and increased revenue realization. This goal means optimizing the various review and approval stages within Icertis, eliminating unnecessary steps and reducing waiting times, which significantly boosts operational efficiency across the entire organization.ProcessMind accurately maps all approval workflows, identifying specific bottlenecks, redundant steps, and areas where approvals stall. It quantifies the impact of each delay point, allowing teams to pinpoint root causes, such as resource constraints or sequential dependencies, and simulate changes to achieve significant cycle time reductions, potentially by 15-30%.

Accelerating negotiation phases means finalizing contracts quicker, leading to faster revenue generation and improved market responsiveness. This objective aims to streamline interactions with counterparties and internal stakeholders within Icertis, minimizing back-and-forth exchanges and reducing the overall time from initial draft to final agreement.ProcessMind visualizes all negotiation loops and identifies the specific activities or events that contribute to prolonged cycles. By analyzing historical data, it uncovers common reasons for delays, such as frequent redlining or missing information, enabling teams to implement targeted improvements that can shorten negotiation times by 10-25% and enhance negotiation strategies.

Achieving higher compliance ensures that all contracts align with internal policies, regulatory requirements, and legal standards. This reduces legal risks, potential fines, and reputational damage. It involves monitoring adherence to defined rules and workflows throughout the contract lifecycle within Icertis, from drafting to execution.ProcessMind automatically detects deviations from prescribed contract management policies and "happy paths." It highlights specific instances of non-compliance, such as unapproved clauses or skipped review steps, allowing organizations to quantify compliance gaps. This insight helps enforce stricter controls and improve adherence rates by 20-40%, thereby strengthening overall contract governance.

An optimized renewal process prevents contracts from expiring unintentionally and ensures timely engagement for renegotiation or termination. This goal focuses on making the end-of-life cycle management within Icertis more proactive and efficient, reducing administrative burden and maximizing contract value.ProcessMind maps the complete renewal and termination workflows, identifying late initiations, missed deadlines, and inefficient hand-offs. It provides visibility into the reasons for delays or complexities, enabling the implementation of automated alerts and standardized procedures. This can lead to a 10-20% improvement in on-time renewals and a more efficient management of the contract portfolio.

Enhanced visibility allows stakeholders to know the exact status of any contract at any given time, fostering better decision-making and proactive management. This goal aims to eliminate information silos and provide a single, accurate source of truth for all contracts managed within Icertis, from initiation to closure, reducing delays due to information gaps.ProcessMind creates an end-to-end visual representation of every contract's journey, making its current status and progression immediately clear. It highlights where contracts are stalled or awaiting input, enabling managers to identify bottlenecks before they significantly impact timelines. This transparency significantly improves operational awareness and allows for better resource planning and expectation setting.

Lowering rework rates in contract drafting directly translates to cost savings, reduced legal review cycles, and faster contract finalization. This goal targets improving the accuracy and completeness of initial contract drafts within Icertis, minimizing the need for extensive revisions and multiple iterations before approval.ProcessMind identifies the root causes of frequent revisions, such as unclear requirements, insufficient initial data, or inconsistent template usage. By analyzing common revision patterns and feedback loops, it provides insights into specific areas for training or process adjustments, potentially reducing rework by 20-35% and improving the efficiency of the drafting team.

Guaranteeing that all contractual obligations are met post-execution is critical for avoiding penalties, maintaining strong business relationships, and realizing full contract value. This objective focuses on proactively managing and monitoring commitments made within Icertis contracts, ensuring timely fulfillment and compliance throughout the contract's active life.ProcessMind tracks activities related to obligation fulfillment, identifying instances where tasks are delayed or not performed according to the contract's terms. It can highlight process gaps or resource issues preventing timely compliance, enabling organizations to improve obligation fulfillment rates by 15-25% and mitigate risks associated with non-compliance.

Efficiently allocating resources, particularly legal and specialized reviewers, minimizes idle time and prevents bottlenecks, ensuring contracts move through review stages promptly. This goal aims to balance workloads and utilize internal expertise effectively within the Icertis contract management process, improving overall team productivity.ProcessMind provides a detailed view of resource utilization across various review activities, highlighting over-allocated or under-utilized resources. It identifies instances where specific individuals or teams become bottlenecks, allowing for better workload distribution and the identification of training needs. This optimization can lead to a 10-20% improvement in resource efficiency and faster review cycles.

Maximizing the use of standard contract templates reduces legal risk, enhances consistency across agreements, and accelerates the drafting process. This goal aims to minimize deviations from pre-approved templates within Icertis, ensuring that contracts are created uniformly and adhere to established organizational standards.ProcessMind can identify and quantify instances where non-standard clauses or templates are used, highlighting the frequency and impact of such deviations. By exposing these patterns, it enables the enforcement of template usage policies and identifies areas where standard templates might need updates, leading to a 20-30% increase in template adherence and reduced legal scrutiny.

Swift and seamless hand-offs between departments, such as legal, procurement, and sales, are crucial for maintaining contract momentum and avoiding unnecessary delays. This goal focuses on identifying and resolving friction points in transitions within the Icertis contract lifecycle, ensuring smooth collaboration and faster overall cycle times.ProcessMind visually maps the transitions between different departments involved in the contract process, precisely quantifying waiting times and delays at each hand-off point. It reveals specific departmental interfaces that act as bottlenecks, enabling targeted interventions to streamline communication and process steps, potentially reducing hand-off delays by 15-25%.

Accurate forecasting of contract execution dates is vital for business planning, revenue recognition, and resource scheduling. This goal aims to enhance the predictability of when contracts managed in Icertis will be finalized, allowing for more reliable financial projections and operational alignment across the organization.ProcessMind analyzes historical contract cycle times and identifies the key factors influencing execution duration, such as contract type, counterparty, or complexity. By uncovering these patterns and providing data-driven insights into expected completion times, it helps improve forecast accuracy by 10-20%, enabling better strategic planning and resource deployment.

The 6-Step Improvement Path for Contract Management

1

Download the Template
2

Export Your Icertis Data
3

Upload Your Dataset
4

Analyze Your Process
5

Implement Improvements
6

Monitor Your Progress
1

Download the Template

What to do

Get the tailored Excel template for Contract Management. This template is designed to structure your Icertis data correctly for analysis.

View Data Template Guide Download Template
Why it matters

Using the right data structure ensures your contract data is accurately prepared, laying a solid foundation for meaningful process analysis.

Expected outcome

A pre-formatted Excel template ready to receive your Icertis contract data.

WHAT YOU WILL GET

Reveal the True Path of Your Icertis Contracts

See your contract workflows come to life, revealing where delays occur and compliance risks emerge. Our platform provides the clarity needed to optimize your Icertis system.
  • Visualize end-to-end contract workflows
  • Identify exact bottlenecks in approvals
  • Monitor compliance and governance adherence
  • Streamline contract review cycles
Discover your actual process flow
Discover your actual process flow
Identify bottlenecks and delays
Identify bottlenecks and delays
Analyze process variants
Analyze process variants
Design your optimized process
Design your optimized process

TYPICAL OUTCOMES

Achieving Excellence in Contract Management

Our process mining solutions uncover inefficiencies and bottlenecks in your contract management lifecycle, driven by detailed analysis of Contract ID data from Icertis. These outcomes illustrate the typical improvements organizations experience by optimizing their contract processes.

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Faster Contract Approvals

Reduction in approval phase

Pinpoint and remove bottlenecks in your approval workflows, drastically cutting down the time it takes for contracts to get greenlit internally.
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Enhanced Policy Adherence

Improved compliance with internal policies

Automatically identify deviations from standard contract processes and policies, ensuring higher adherence and reducing risk across your contract portfolio.
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Shorter Negotiation Cycles

Decrease in average negotiation duration

Analyze negotiation patterns to identify delays and high-rework areas, leading to faster agreement on terms with counterparties and quicker deal closure.
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Reduced Stalled Contracts

Fewer contracts stuck in process

Gain real-time insights into contracts that are stalled or progressing slowly, allowing proactive intervention to keep deals moving and prevent delays.
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Higher Obligation Adherence

Improved completion of contractual duties

Track and ensure that all post-execution contractual obligations are met on time, minimizing risks and improving relationships with your business partners.
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Optimized Review Hand-offs

Reduction in legal review wait times

Identify and resolve bottlenecks in legal review queues and inter-departmental hand-offs, ensuring resources are optimally utilized and contracts move faster.

Results vary based on your specific process complexity, data quality, and strategic focus areas. These figures represent typical improvements observed across various contract management implementations.

FAQs

Frequently asked questions

Process mining analyzes your Icertis data to visualize the actual contract lifecycle, identifying bottlenecks in approvals, negotiations, and renewals. It reveals deviations from standard processes and pinpoints areas for efficiency gains. This helps you understand where contracts get stuck and why, leading to faster cycles and better compliance.

To begin, we primarily need event logs from Icertis, which include the Case Identifier, Contract ID, Activity, and Timestamp for each event. This data allows us to reconstruct the complete journey of every contract. We also benefit from additional attribute data related to the contracts, such as contract type or value, to enrich our analysis.

Implementing process mining typically involves extracting historical data from Icertis, not altering your current system configuration. The process mining tool connects to this data, so there's usually minimal disruption to your live operations. The focus is on data extraction and subsequent analysis, not system integration in the traditional sense.

You can expect significant improvements in key performance indicators such as reduced contract approval cycle times and shorter negotiation phases. The insights gained help enhance policy compliance, streamline renewal processes, and improve real-time visibility into contract status. Ultimately, this leads to more efficient operations and better resource allocation.

The main technical prerequisite is the ability to extract event log data from Icertis, typically through its reporting features or direct database access. You'll need access credentials and potentially some technical support from your IT team for data export. No specific hardware or software needs to be installed directly within your Icertis environment.

After data extraction and initial preparation, which can take a few days to a couple of weeks depending on data complexity, initial insights can often be generated within another week or two. The first phase focuses on visualizing the as-is process and identifying obvious bottlenecks. Deeper analysis and solution development will follow.

Yes, process mining can precisely pinpoint where and why rework occurs most frequently in contract drafting within Icertis. By analyzing the sequence of events and user interactions, it highlights specific stages or departments that contribute most to revisions. This data-driven insight allows you to target improvements directly, reducing the need for repeated modifications.

Process mining automatically compares the actual execution of your contract processes against your defined internal policies and ideal process models. It identifies every instance of deviation, such as skipped approval steps or unauthorized changes. This helps you proactively address non-compliant behaviors and enforce consistent adherence to your contract guidelines.

Absolutely. Process mining visualizes the workload distribution across different review stages and teams, revealing where resources are over or underutilized. By identifying choke points caused by resource imbalances, it provides data to reallocate personnel more effectively. This ensures smoother process flow and prevents delays caused by insufficient or misassigned reviewers.

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