EMERGING ISSUES
Contract Management and Negotiation A Delicious Recipe for Success by Sean Heck
As a contract management professional, you must be able to cook up a deliciously low-friction contract negotiations process. However, without a centralized and organized system for contract negotiations, you can end up burning the meal for all contract lifecycle management stakeholders at the table. But fear not: leading contract management software can be the secret ingredient to a savory, delectable contract negotiations process. Read on to learn how. CONTRACT NEGOTIATION Contract negotiation is a crucial step in the contract lifecycle that involves document assembly, contract authoring, and contract collaboration with stakeholders. In the contract negotiation stage, contract parties and stakeholders negotiate the terms and conditions drafted during contract authoring. After back-and-forth contract collaboration and redlining, conditions agreed upon supply insight concerning the expectations of all involved contract parties. Before you cook up a mouthwatering contract negotiations platter, let’s see what tools you have in your contract lifecycle management kitchen. NEGOTIATION SOFTWARE TOOLS Negotiation software tools are contract management software features that assist you in finalizing the negotiation of a contract. These tools can include:
18 NATIONAL PARAL EG A L R EPO RT ER ®
• dynamic contract authoring. • online document editing. • comprehensive document collaboration and version control. • contract content control and clause ownership. • and a centralized contract collaboration portal. Let’s dive into these crucial contract negotiations ingredients further. INGREDIENT #1 - A DASH OF DYNAMIC CONTRACT AUTHORING Add a dash of dynamic contract authoring to your contract negotiations recipe! Contract management software with dynamic contract authoring can help you author documents using templates to merge contract field data with clauses from your pre-approved language library. Including a clause library among your ingredients can help produce timely, compliant, and accurate documents and contracts for collaboration with internal users, vendors, and external stakeholders. Yum! You can also pre-approved clause libraries to pepper in document templates such as those used for FAR, DFAR, and GSA contracts – if applicable. You can also take care of CLIN (contract line item number) management and the inclusion of line items within contract templates. Contract
documents can also be exported as standard file formats such as MS Word and PDFs to add to your spicy CLM cabinet. Robust contract management software solutions, such as CobbleStone Contract Insight®, allow you to stir in documents online in-system. With
CobbleStone®,
you
can:
• create new documents straight from a user-friendly CobbleStone record information page. • import new documents straight into a CobbleStone record information page. • seamlessly edit existing documents straight from a CobbleStone record information page with essentially no friction. You can also add two heaping tablespoons of mission-critical connectors for contract authoring. For example, CobbleStone Software supports connectors for concurrent online document editing within MS Office 365 and Google Workspace. You can leverage these savory connectors to collaborate with internal and external stakeholders concurrently online for a familiar collaboration and word processing experience. INGREDIENT #2 - A CUP OF DOCUMENT COLLABORATION & VERSION CONTROL Add a cup of document collaboration and version control to your culinary contract
