Contract Lifecycle Management Systems – are the systems that serve specifically to house all of an organization’s contracts. These systems, being specifically designed to manage contracts, come with built-in features that will assist you in getting all your contractual documents into one centralized location and tracking them.

These systems are a breed of software, running either on-premise or in the cloud, which serve the specific function of organizing and managing your contracts. These systems not only are geared towards being a central repository optimized for multi-document contracts but are also able to track important information within them which is usually lost if you use only a document storage system. This information typically includes all the salient elements, such as type of agreement, parties, expiration date, term, start date, governing law, etc., that are associated with the full gamut of files and documents that constitute a “contract”. These individual data elements are popularly known as “attributes”. CLM software is geared to give you alerts, such as an email reminder prior to a contract expiration date. And they allow you to select, sort, search, filter, and report on these attributes.

When you configure a CLM, you can give specific, multiple levels of user and group access control. You can define which attributes you would like to track, set your alerts, and create reports for migrating intelligence from your contracts to aid in decision-making and compliance.

So, for example, if you wish to give a report of all the vendors in the state of California who are supplying product “x” and have a late delivery penalty clause, you can run such a report provided you initially chose to track these attributes within the system.

For more information view our white paper on 7 Reasons to load your legacy contracts into a new CLM system.