Challenges in the Life of a Contracts Professional
Caught in a whirlwind of ever-increasing demands, GovCon contracts professionals find themselves in a routine filled with administrative burdens rather than strategic initiatives. They are forced to spend their time being reactive – responding to customer data calls, working to catch up with business development, confirming finance and accounting data…the list goes on and on. The day-to-day administrative burden, especially the manual effort required to input new contracts documents and agreements, severely limits or can even prevent the ability of contracts administrators, managers, and senior executives to focus on the business and the customer.
Among these tasks, inputting new contracts and agreements is the most time-consuming. The opportunity cost of such manual, repetitive tasks is high, affecting productivity and limiting the strategic contribution of the contracts team.
The Challenges of Adopting a Contract Management System
One way to overcome a contracts professional’s repetitive, manual work is to implement a Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) tool. A well-tuned CLM system can streamline the contracting process, from creation to closeout, enhancing contract compliance and minimizing associated risks. However, a significant barrier to implementing a CLM tool is the time-consuming process of entering all the contract data into the system, both at the beginning of the migration to the new software and throughout the tool’s life.
The barrier of data migration was recently underscored at the NCMA SubCon event in Arlington, VA, in March. A panel of GovCon acquisition leaders came together to discuss the contemporary challenges in contract data management. They explored how technological innovation can address these challenges. The consensus? Data migration is the number one limiting factor in technology implementation.
Finally, UnisonCLM has addressed the data migration challenge head-on.
Solving the Problems of Our Most Important Stakeholders
Today’s CLM market has various tools for workflow efficiency, approval processes, data storage, analytics and reporting, sales and finance system integration, and more. At Unison, we focus on the voice of the customer, and we believe our newest capability hits right at the heart of one of their most painstaking and unaddressed processes for any contracts professional – manual data migration and entry.
Picture this – you’re a contract manager juggling multiple contracts, each peppered with its unique array of terms, clauses, dates, and values. Now imagine manually entering this sea of information into a system. You’re constantly cross-checking and triple-checking to ensure no single error slips in. Every minute spent on this tedious task is a minute taken away from strategic decision-making. This meticulous, manual process can often lead to burnout, and the risk of human error inevitably increases, potentially leading to costly mistakes.
Shouldn’t there be an easier way?
We’re excited to share with the GovCon community our newest CLM module: Data Extraction (DE). The DE module uses Amazon Textract to automate the input of complex contracts and agreements documents into the CLM repository. With this new capability, users have experienced 97% clause data accuracy, 50% faster CLIN extraction, and 90% faster clause extraction—freeing them up to focus on many pressing efforts such as contracts negotiations, teaming arrangements, and business priorities.
The Data Extraction Module showcases our commitment to making CLM adoption a reality for government contract professionals. Minimizing the major roadblock of manual data entry makes attaining a CLM system more feasible by streamlining the transition for new users and boosting performance for existing ones–transforming contract management into a strategic advantage.