7 Steps to Sourcing Success

Is your sourcing keeping up with the pace of business? A new whitepaper shows why agile Contract Lifecycle Management gives you the best chance for success.

To learn more about all Seven Steps for Successful Sourcing, get your copy of Agiloft’s whitepaper here.

As global supply chains get more and more complex, maintaining supplier relationships and reducing risks becomes more challenging. This has only become more apparent over the past two years with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. If getting access to data is a struggle, if your source-to-contract process is too complex, or if you feel vulnerable in the rapidly changing business landscape, now is the time to consider how agile Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) can help. An agile CLM platform gives you the tools you need for tighter control, greater speed, and smarter decisions. 

Sourcing Success Using Contract Lifecycle Management 

Gaining an edge in sourcing is all about better access to data and streamlining the source-to-contract process. Organisations that have deployed CLM are better suited to take control of this process, and here are just seven steps to getting there:

1. Build a contract repository. Get rid of cumbersome siloed data. You want to be seeing the forest and the trees. Digitise your contracts and create a single, enterprise-wide repository for immediate access and complete transparency. 
2. Extract Data. Transparency is knowledge. Knowledge is invaluable. Think of contract data as the DNA of your business, where crucial information about business relationships is stored. CLM allows you to extract this information to develop the working grounds for moving forward.
3. Harmonise your templates. Avoid confusion and risk. Variety is the spice of life, but not when it comes to legal contracts. Consolidate the versions of your agreements to establish standard templates and clauses for consistency and efficiency. 
4. Streamline Supplier Onboarding. Increase your efficiencies. A robust CLM solution delivers supplier information management capabilities to streamline your workflows so you can jumpstart your next projects with up-to-date, pre-approved RFx language and templates. 
5. Track Vendor Performance and Compliance. Be prepared. Procurement leaders must consider market volatility in their relationships with suppliers. CLM enables active management of contracts to ensure compliance requirements are being met as well as to identify potential risks.
6. Find Opportunities for Savings. Reduce complexity. The more suppliers you work with, the less buying power you have. CLM enables you to review your supplier database to find opportunities for consolidation and volume discounts. 
7. Automate, Automate. In today’s business world, time isn’t just money; time is everything. To achieve a competitive advantage, procurement teams must be able to complete their business objective with more agility and speed than ever. A robust CLM platform allows you to configure and automate the complete source-to-contract workflow so that the system can do the work for you with just a few clicks. 

Factors to Focus on When Picking Your CLM

With its ability to adapt to market conditions, save time, and optimise spend, agile CLM is the differentiator for doing business in this ever-shifting digital world. In fact, industry analysts at Gartner project that 90% of enterprises will have a contract management system by 2023. 

So, odds are your organisation is already considering CLM. When you are ready to begin your search, here are the primary factors to look for: 

1. Flexibility and Ease of Implementation. The more complex your sourcing processes are, the greater the CLM flexibility you will need. An agile AI-based CLM platform offers the smoothest implementation, especially if it is no-code. 
2. Ease of Integration. If you want to get the most from your contract data, your CLM solution must integrate with your existing enterprise ecosystem. Find the platform that best integrates with your current ecosystem.
3. Ease of Use. The more user-friendly and the less IT resources it requires once it’s up and running, the more successful the platform will be. A flexible no-code interface greatly increases user adoption and improves efficiency, while also giving business users the tools to easily make necessary changes themselves.
4. Scalability and Extensibility. Choose a platform that provides the agility to scale and evolve with you as you grow. For scalability, it’s important to choose a vendor with a reliable cloud provider with infrastructure around the globe. For extensibility, it should allow for data to flow into adjacent areas surrounding contracts. 

Of course, it should go without saying: Look for a leading supplier that provides a guarantee on its software and stands by its implementations, with a published success rate of 98% or greater. Only by doing this do you give yourself the best chance of taking these seven key steps and finding your own success.

To delve deeper, check out Seven Steps to Success in Sourcing white paper. To learn more about Agiloft CLM, visit www.agiloft.com.