Since we first released OpenText™ Contract Center to support centralized contract management, we’ve been gathering feedback from customers about how to make it even better. What they like about Contract Center is that it streamlines and standardizes contract management across the enterprise, helping eliminate the practice of contract handling by individual departments and lines of business. Contract Center’s approach to managing all types of legally binding contracts with connected, intelligent workflow processes – from initiation to negotiation, approval, and renewal – makes it much easier to enforce contract standardization and compliance enterprise-wide, while offering intelligent automation to accelerate cycle times and boost operational efficiency.
What’s New: Reusable libraries
With the latest release of OpenText Contract Center, simplification takes another step forward thanks to libraries for reusable term management, clauses, and templates. The result is more standardization and consistency, less manual work, and lower risk of non-compliance.
- Term management: Contract authors can identify variable information, such as price, notice period, and quantity, in contract documents as standard terms so they can be used as placeholders in clauses. Values for these variables can then be provided at the contract level during document generation to increase efficiency and ensure compliance with company standards.
- Clause library: Users can manage a library of approved clauses that can be reused in various contracts. Having this library improves the efficiency of the contract creation process as the pre-approved clauses are available for selection by authors of contracts and templates. The use of pre-approved clauses also reduces the time required to review the contract. Clauses can be tagged into categories across contract types for better grouping and classification.
- Template library: Authors can create standard templates using collections of pre-approved clauses and terms from the clause library, streamlining the contract creation process. Templates are then pre-approved for reuse.
What’s new: Contract authoring and creation
The latest release of Contract Center brings a rich set of functionalities designed to make contract authoring easy and less risky, including:
- Integration with key solutions: In and of itself, OpenText Contract Center is a complete, out-of-the box solution for automating the contract lifecycle. Integration with other OpenText products further extends its functionality for automated document capture, analytics and archival, as well as enterprise content and records management. The latest release of Contract Center supports OpenText™ Extended ECM, in addition to OpenText™ Content Server and OpenText™ Core™.
- Standardized document layouts: Users can define their preferred layout in Microsoft® Word and map the layout to the corresponding template in Contract Center. This feature supports consistency across multiple contract documents, with the ability to define multiple layouts to comply with differing geographical and policy requirements.
- Collaboration: Contract requesters can submit a request for a new contract, providing details and attachments for review by the request approver. The contract author can create contracts for approved requests and send back incomplete submissions, asking for additional details and modifications. Requesters can also assign tasks and send emails within Contract Center, a feature that encourages collaboration.
- Contract generation: Users can generate contract documents from within Contract Center using the selected template, preview the document and save it as a new contract version. Contract documents are generated in DOCX format which can be formatted or edited using familiar software such as Microsoft Word.
- Email notifications: Participants in contract management activities such as template creation, task management, clause approval, and so on, are notified of relevant actions by email; there’s no need to log in periodically to check status.
- Flexible review and approval: As each contract goes through a lifecycle, moving from the draft state through negotiation, pre-execution, execution, and activation, it may require close review and approval at each stage. Similarly, clauses and templates also contain important information with legal and financial implications that may need to be reviewed by approvers. The review feature in Contract Center enables administrators to configure the review process and provide alternate forward and backward paths, as appropriate, to quickly execute a contract.
Today’s contract professionals demand ease of use in their everyday work. Besides boosting satisfaction by simplifying access and eliminating repetitive manual effort, OpenText Contract Center dramatically improves governance and reduces the risk of non-compliance. With these new features, the new release is an even more robust solution for achieving these objectives.
To learn more about OpenText Contract Center, visit our website.
