How Dynamic Contracting Leads to Business Agility

Today’s business environment calls for continuous adaptation. Managing contracts with customers and suppliers is a huge part of daily business for most organisations. Agile businesses use dynamic contracting to create a smoother process for customers, employees and suppliers. Simplifying and digitising internal workflows and contracts across functions, such as sales, legal, procurement, finance and HR, can help your team do business faster and adapt rapidly to a changing environment. 

To achieve a competitive advantage, your teams must complete their business objectives with more agility than ever. For example, with DocuSign eSignature, customers can sign 80% of agreements in less than a day, and contract processing time can be reduced by 83% with DocuSign CLM. Contracting agility can increase an organisation's ability to respond to change and manage increasing volumes of complex agreements. 

Agile contract management and business agility

Agile contracts allow for a collaborative, flexible and appropriate response to change. The agility offered by a centralised contract platform is a helpful way to deal with business uncertainties in the current environment. Procurement teams and other departments must be able to quickly evaluate potential risks, increase responsiveness and utilise technology to analyse a large volume of contracts. 

Using agile contracts and contract management systems like DocuSign CLM helps to create an early warning system for potential issues and highlight changes that need to be made as regulatory changes emerge or business changes. Dynamic contracting can help businesses become more agile because

• Centralising contract activity in a single platform makes contracts and agreements easier to locate. A central repository also acts as a measurable and accessible source of truth for legal and procurement departments. 
• Automate manual contract processes and remove labour-intensive paper-based processes. Contract automation is critical for growing companies that need to reach aggressive business goals with limited resources.
• Standardising contracts by creating dynamic contract templates and allowing legal teams to create pre-approved clauses.
• Enabling teams to get contracting done digitally facilitates collaboration and remote working.
• Artificial Intelligence and analytics can also help teams perform risk assessments and work smarter. 
• Ability to search contracts by a keyword, legal concept, or metadata to easily detect and update contracts subject to legal, regulatory or pricing updates. 

Examples of Increased Business Agility with Contract Lifecycle Management 

K2 Partnering 

K2 Partnering offers consultative solutions that deliver productivity and innovation to clients, placing both permanent and contract consultancy positions with companies to help them transform and achieve the fastest path to success. K2 Partnering wanted to ensure that their complex contractual interactions with employees and clients flowed more efficiently and chose to automate their contracts with DocuSign CLM. Prior to implementation, continuing manually had become almost impossible as they had accumulated over 300 different contract template types and a further 200 templates relating to candidates. The K2 team also desired better risk control and decreased exposure to risk. 

DocuSign CLM provided a solution to the situation's complexity with automated templates; these dynamic documents have pre-defined clauses that are dropped into user-generated contracts to meet the terms and conditions of individual engagements. At K2, the DocuSign CLM solution was integrated with Salesforce to allow an automated population of contracts with data from Salesforce CRM. These changes accelerated the speed of contract completion and also enabled the K2 team to get a better understanding of risk. Recipients also benefit as they can quickly tap-to-sign their agreements from a mobile device. 

UNILEVER

Unilever also partnered with DocuSign to implement DocuSign CLM across their business. The Smarter Contracting initiative led to a 50% reduction in average contract completion time and an 80% reduction in contract drafting time. Unilever has over 400 brands—including Dove, Lipton and Ben & Jerry’s—in 190 countries; every day, 2.5 billion people use Unilever products. Unilever uses multiple products from the DocuSign Agreement Cloud, integrated with other Unilever systems. Where before people needed to manually find, copy and paste the correct information into contracts, it is now there for them automatically. Find out more about Unilever’s Smarter Contracting.  The DocuSign Agreement Cloud can help your team achieve business agility by accelerating and creating resilient, flexible workflows for all of your agreements. Discover more about achieving better business agility with DocuSign.