SciQuest
Viable Strategy Leveraged for Contract Management

A largely manual process for many organizations, contract management is often a time-consuming, whether it’s generating contracts or authoring, approving and executing them. Most public companies deal with thousands of contracts, each one with its own unique set of stipulations, deadlines and other hidden risks that can lead to noncompliance or cost overruns. Essentially, contracts are too critical to every business which adds risks operating in a manual environment. To answer this on-going challenge, Morrisville, NC, SciQuest provides viable strategy to help organizations deal with the increasing volume and complexity of contracts. “Improving the contract management process Contract lifecycle management process through automation can have a significant impact on the bottom line and increasing efficiency,” says Stephen Wiehe, President and CEO, SciQuest.

The company provides a suite of cloud-based spend management solutions which are modeled like an e-commerce platform, offering several options for Contract Lifecycle Management, Procurement, Supplier Management, Spend Analytics, Supplier Network, Sourcing, Inventory Management, and Accounts Payable. The integrated suite delivers a seamless process for visualizing spend across the organization, managing supplier data, incorporating that supplier data into eSourcing events, and translating eSourcing results into actionable contracts. This includes being connected to diverse groups of quality suppliers so that the client is able to discover collaborative partners who can lower cost for goods and services while minimizing risks and ensuring compliance.

To explicate, the Contract Lifecycle Management enlists a number of key functionalities such as utilizing standard legal- and compliance-approved template language that allows organizations to reduce the time legal and compliance departments spend reviewing contracts.This aspect gives the ability to standardize contract language and processing for organizations. Additionally, CLM also provides vendor compliance and performance management against contracts, allowing organizations to effectively gauge vendor performance and take appropriate action if needed. When important, automated notifications to the appropriate parties are given, including their contracting dates, to ensure all parties are aware of important dates.

Improving the contract management process Contract lifecycle management process through automation can have a significant impact on the bottom line and increasing efficiency

Thus, by providing a secure central repository, CLM solutions also allow organizations to ensure only the right people in the organization have visibility into the contracts. Another distinctive aspect of the CLM solution is the document and record management policies through the repository.

The innovative approach of SciQuest has helped to solve the unique set of challenges faced by their 500 plus global customers. This approach is highly beneficial when it comes to specific details to leverage multinational support, concern in understanding different tax rates, formulas, compliance requirements and languages. For example, their spend analysis solution enables organizations and procurement departments to classify and normalize all spend data to create an accurate and consistent data set–a single source of truth–to feed all purchasing decisions.

SciQuest is taking innovation in many new directions, including ensuring technology adoption by enhancing the way stakeholders leverage advanced procurement technology. This includes new levels of system wide transparency to provide the right level of information needed at the right time to the right stakeholders, which includes access through mobile solutions, exception handling, and enhanced reporting. Our vision is to bring advanced optimization and analytic intelligence to work seamlessly throughout the enterprise to seamlessly and dynamically manage the entire spend and supplier performance management lifecycle," concludes Wiehe.