Find Savings in Vendor Agreements with AI-Powered Analysis

If someone on your team asks you a question about a vendor’s payment terms, how long does it take you to locate the agreement and find the answer? Multiply your answer by every time you need to do this for a week, a month, or a year, and it quickly adds up to a lot of hours squinting at screens searching for information that should be at your fingertips, not buried in obscure folders and spreadsheets.

But it’s not just about wasted time and strained eyes. It’s everything else that comes with poor agreement visibility and accessibility: missed deadlines, lost leverage, costly penalties, and strained relationships.

A recent Deloitte study revealed that procurement teams struggled to find the latest approved vendor terms, resulting in overpayments and missed opportunities for renegotiation and cost savings. On average, the study found procurement teams could save more than a million dollars a year from missed contractual incentives.

Procurement teams are under more pressure than ever to find savings fast. But when agreements are buried in disconnected systems—or locked away in static files where critical data is hard to access—uncovering those opportunities becomes a slow, frustrating grind.

Docusign Navigator helps you cut the paper chase and get insights faster by bringing all your vendor agreements together in one smart, searchable location. As a core service within the Docusign Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) platform, Navigator’s centralized repository leverages AI to automatically track and surface key contract terms—such as renewal dates, SLAs, and rebates—giving teams the data they need to act quickly, stay ahead of key milestones, and negotiate with greater confidence.

Spot savings in seconds with comprehensive search capabilities and AI-assisted data extractions

Renewals and negotiations are prime opportunities to unlock savings, especially from payment terms. But, without fast and reliable access to key terms, your team risks sitting at the table underprepared and with less leverage.

Navigator’s search and AI-assisted data extractions make it quick and easy to uncover cost-saving opportunities that would otherwise take hours of manual work. In just a few clicks, your team can instantly surface contracts that are up for renewal, identify current payment terms, and see where there are opportunities to push for more favorable conditions. Using those insights, your team is empowered to:

• Flag promising contracts for negotiation by identifying agreements with upcoming renewals, outdated terms, or high spend

• Quickly find agreements and terms to spot inconsistencies across vendors and push for standardization to simplify management and strengthen leverage

• Uncover missed opportunities, like unclaimed rebates or service credits that were negotiated but never tracked

• Build a focused list of targets to renegotiate, such as expanding payment terms to improve working capital or securing discounts in exchange for early payment

Faster agreement insights: A procurement team dramatically reduced the time it spent answering internal requests—like confirming travel terms in an SOW, checking for active NDAs, and reviewing non-solicitation clauses—using Navigator’s comprehensive search capabilities and automatically extracted fields.

Avoid missed renewals and last-minute scrambles with automated notifications 

Renewal windows are key opportunities to evaluate vendor performance, reduce duplication, and secure better terms. But when those dates sneak up on your team or go by unnoticed, your leverage slips and vendors gain the upper hand.

Navigator helps you flip the script with renewal notifications that automatically alert your team and all relevant stakeholders of upcoming auto-renewals, giving you the time and insights to make informed decisions and plan your negotiation strategy. 

Navigator’s renewal dashboard simplifies planning and cross-functional collaboration by giving you a full view of your renewals pipeline. You can plan for review cycles, team check-ins, and negotiations.

Staying ahead leads to big savings:

• Avoid price hikes buried in renewal clauses

• Discontinue legacy tools or suppliers that are no longer delivering value

• Tighten contract language to reduce risks and downstream costs

• Expand payment terms or discounts that generate savings

With better data and greater alignment, your team can step out of reactive mode and stop burning time, energy, and budget on last-minute scrambles.

Working capital gains made easy: A procurement team launched a working capital improvement project using Navigator’s renewal dashboard to identify contracts up for renewal with outdated payment terms. In just a few clicks, they built a target list for renegotiation that they used to negotiate improved payment terms and drive working capital.

Keep vendors accountable with enhanced agreement oversight

SLAs are some of the most difficult and time-consuming terms to negotiate in vendor agreements. Yet, once the contract is signed, those hard-earned provisions often go unmonitored or, worse, completely forgotten. That means no visibility into whether vendors are meeting their obligations and missed opportunities to hold them accountable and recover lost value.

In short, your team is spending considerable time and effort negotiating protections that are not being enforced.

Navigator’s newest features—including custom extractions and Obligation Management—close that gap by leveraging Docusign Iris, our AI engine, to automatically identify and surface terms unique to your organization, as well as important renewal, payment, and termination terms. 

Together, these features help you: 

• Boost productivity with AI-driven metadata tracking 

• Stay on top of upcoming deadlines, such as renewals, with automated email notifications 

• Simplify compliance monitoring with more consistent and precise agreement records

• Improve cash flow management with real-time visibility into payment schedules and commitments

• Enhance decision-making with deeper, organization- and industry-specific insights 

With terms tagged and easily accessible, your procurement team—and other business units—can quickly identify which agreements contain SLAs, track whether obligations are being met, and act quickly whenever there’s a breach or even the prospect of one. Tagging can cover contract attributes like:

• Annual contract value and total contract value, giving you a clear view of contract size and long-term financial commitments

• Payment terms (e.g., Net 30), so you can quickly spot opportunities to renegotiate for more favorable cash flow

• Late fees and late fee percentages, helping you understand penalties tied to payment delays

• Price cap increase percentages, allowing you to track and manage cost escalations over time

Obligation Management helps you go even deeper, surfacing high-impact payment obligations such as:

• Deposit or initial payment amounts, including calculated values when terms are implied rather than stated

• Due dates and timeframes for one-time or upfront payments

• Late payment interest rates and penalty clauses

• One-time payment terms, including amounts, due dates, and durations

• Responsible party identification, clarifying which party is obligated to fulfill the payment

One playbook for every vendor: A procurement team used Navigator to analyze newly proposed payment terms against existing agreements with the same vendor. They quickly spotted and flagged  “on receipt” payment terms that did not align with past agreements.

Know more, save more: The power of AI analysis for vendor agreements

Your vendor contracts are full of untapped value. As a core service of the Docusign IAM platform, Navigator and its AI-powered analysis give you and your team the insights to unlock more savings and turn vendor agreements into a competitive advantage.

Contact our sales team to learn how Docusign IAM and Navigator can help you bring more efficiency to supplier management.