Use This Simple Process to Review Your Contract Portfolio

Reviewing an entire contract portfolio may seem daunting, but engaging in an ongoing yet simple review process will prevent it from ever becoming too overwhelming. One of the best ways to facilitate periodic review is to ensure that the portfolio is organized well. This can be accomplished by investing in a dynamic contract lifecycle management solution and establishing an online contract repository. Once the online database has been set up, the following steps will enable the contract management team to engage in regular albeit abbreviated reviews of the contract portfolio:

Categorize Contracts

Uploading contracts to an online database should not take too long, and with the right solution, there should be a way to quickly drag and drop them into folders. Of course, the contract management team may want to give some thought as to how those folders are categorized. In some industries, it may make sense to classify them by agreement type, whereas in others they may need to be grouped by timeframe or date. It is obviously important to do what makes sense for your company and to ensure everyone understands the classification system that is instituted. With this sort of well-oiled system in place, it is a lot easier to keep a handle on things.

Divide and Conquer

This is another area that is very industry-dependent, but it is highly unlikely that any company can afford to have an entire contract team devoted to managing one portfolio. More than likely, it is more realistic to divvy up the team and the contracts so that there is a leader for each relevant sphere. The entire team will obviously have to coordinate and communicate, but resources must be allocated in the most efficient manner possible. This is what collaborative contract management is about. In turn, this will allow for several individuals to keep an eye on a smaller batch of contracts, thereby facilitating those periodic reviews.

Outsource the Tedium to Technology

The main reason that companies turn to contract management software is probably due to the tedious nature of contract oversight. A huge facet of this kind of management involves diligently updating and monitoring the calendar to ensure that the right things are coming in and going out of the office, like product deliveries and payments for goods. Fortunately, CLM software can easily handle this aspect with the creation of alerts that send email reminders and report generation that will show things like payments or deliveries that are pending. By outsourcing the tedium to technology, it becomes a lot easier to focus on things like external performance and operational productivity.

Flip the Switch

The aforementioned actions will allow the contract management mean to conduct regular yet simple reviews of the portfolio and to report on progress. However, one additional method to ensure that nothing is missed is to have the teams responsible for a certain segment of the contracts take a look at another team’s batch of contracts. This kind of flipping ensures that there is a fresh set of eyes occasionally reviewing contracts they do not routinely address. In addition to allowing for the contract management team to double-check each other in a sense, this will serve as a learning opportunity for everyone, enabling the team to constantly refine and perfect their respective management approaches and systems.