Accelerating Source-to-Pay Value with CLM-Driven Agreement Transformation

⇨ Procurement teams are being pushed to extend their focus beyond cost and supply assurance to drive strategic business value by managing spend, supplier relations, risk, sourcing, purchasing, and compliance effectively.

⇨ Effective Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) is essential for streamlining the Source-to-Pay process, enhancing visibility in vendor contracts, reducing risks, and improving contract integrity through automation and analytics.

⇨ Docusign offers innovative solutions to address procurement challenges by automating workflows, streamlining document generation, and integrating with third-party applications, ultimately improving efficiency and collaboration in sourcing and purchasing operations.

While cost and supply assurance continue to be the most pressing deliverables for procurement teams, they are expected to look beyond the traditional procurement goals and drive strategic business value. This includes focusing on critical business functional directives like managing spend, supplier management, risk management, sourcing and purchasing, and compliance and governance. However, despite these broader expectations, procurement teams still face challenges related to complex document management that result in limited contract visibility and inefficient approval processes, creating inefficient procurement cycles, non-compliant contracting, unauthorized auto-renewals, and reduced contract value.

From selecting suppliers to processing the final payment, every step in the Source-to-Pay (S2P) process requires well documented contracts to enhance efficiency and accountability and extract value—an essential part that reflects why contract lifecycle management (CLM) is crucial. However, most organizations use manual or paper-based contract management methods that result in inefficiencies and unexpected costs which in turn result in increased contract value leakage, risk exposure, and decreased contract integrity.

Contract lifecycle management (CLM) is the pivotal foundation for business activities like sourcing and purchasing as it captures key contract details—such as pricing terms, delivery schedules, and compliance requirements. CLM solutions also automate the management of contracts including reviewing vendor agreements to ensure their accuracy and alignment with business goals any time an enterprise buys or sells assets, products, or services. Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) not only provides visibility into vendor contract lifecycle, but it can also integrate with Source-to-Pay processes and identify risks like duplicate purchases and overpayments, and reduce such risks through analytics, security, and track-and-trace capabilities built into the contract management process.

Docusign addresses these challenges by innovating solutions to streamline source-to-pay workflows. Docusign CLM accelerates and streamlines the source-to-pay agreement process by streamlining document generation, enhancing collaboration, automating workflows, and integrating with key third-party business applications like SAP Ariba, Coupa, and NetSuite. These integrations enable procurement teams to easily create new vendor agreements, ingest third-party documents, and manage workflow tasks across platforms. With Docusign’s advanced AI and analytics capabilities, organizations can save time during contract review, reduce risk, and make contracts more discoverable as it automatically identifies and extracts key contract terms by leveraging AI-powered agreement summarization. Using these features, businesses can improve the experience for customers, vendors, partners, and employees.

Learn more on how Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) can be a value multiplier in source-to-pay agreement processes in Docusign’s upcoming webinar Maximizing Value in Source-to-Pay: How to Transform Agreement Processes with CLM on November 13^th, 2024, at 12:00 pm EST.

Register here.