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Contract Management for the Enterprise

I-many delivers contract management software and services for the enterprise. I-many Contract Management for the Enterprise enables the management of the entire contract lifecycle, from pre-contract processes and contract management to active compliance and contract optimization. The result is an end-to-end solution that provides enterprises with greater levels of insight into contract performance, allowing companies to improve profitability and achieve measurable return on investment.

The Challenge

The great majority of business relationships are framed with contracts that define critical business transactions and their expected results. These contracts are the cornerstone for managing business relationships and transactions, yet most of these documents are stored as paper. Those contracts that are online are stored in image or pDF format. Creation processes involve a virtual barrage of email, review and often result in non-standard documents. Once the contract is in place, critical understanding about contract performance, discounts, rebates and performance milestones are often incorrectly managed. At best, these are managed by using spreadsheets, notes and file folders or in the heads of individual team members. To raise the bar, commercial contracts are further complicated by Government contracting programs. These Federal and State contracting programs may create regulatory and pricing challenges. This is due to complex interaction between commercial contracting pricing and terms and those required for government relationships. Failure to comply can mean large financial penalties, often in the millions of dollars, or perhaps even worse through criminal liability for managers within the enterprise.

The Opportunity

The contract lifecycle includes all the phases of pre-contract, contract, compliance and analysis that constitute the lifecycle of a contract document. This spans a broad range of organizational functions and processes.

Each phase provides an additional opportunity for increased efficiency and return on investment.

The Solution – The Contract Management Enterprise Foundation Model

I-many’s Contract Management Enterprise Foundation Model defines the broad set of functionality required to address the opportunity presented by the contract lifecycle. Foundation Model provides the strategic roadmap necessary to fulfill contract management needs of the enterprise. I-many is the only supplier to address all three Foundation Model levels with a comprehensive and highly integrated, industry-relevant product set.

Foundation Level One provides contract infrastructure software, including authoring, self-service and storage. These infrastructure products fit well across multiple industries contract-authoring requirements by providing functionality to automate contract-creation business processes to run the enterprise more efficiently. Foundation Level One products provide online storage and access to contracts allowing stable and repeatable business processes to align to meet the requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley.

Foundation Level Two provides compliance software for both commercial and government contracting to address the opportunity in revenue management and optimization. Foundation Level Two products are aligned with industry-specific compliance requirements. The barrier to entry is very high—domain knowledge must exist in the compliance software for the complexities of the supply chain, rebates, incentives, chargebacks and a host of very specific financial arrangements. Software tools must inherently and very specifically address the requirements of the industry prior to any integration or customization. Revenue optimization is one of the critical factors for driving ROI to the highest levels of achievement and, only when combined with revenue management, gives you the ability to drive the business to meet target business milestones and objectives. Revenue management alone is not enough.

Foundation Level Three provides contract analytics software that provides insight into the business and strategy. Contract analytics pulls together multiple views of the contract lifecycle within the enterprise, including past performance, current negotiations and projected performance. Foundation Level Three applications are extensible to provide a concurrent view of both commercial and government programs. From simple applications, such as accruals and financial projection, to complex views where government programs in one business area adversely affect projected margins and business practice in another commercial area, Foundation Level Three software creates awareness of opportunities and risk previously not visible. Foundation Level Three positions the enterprise to better understand and set strategies for success.

Only I-many provides integrated solutions, available today, across all three foundation levels to address the requirements of contract management for the enterprise.

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