Digital Day 2023: An introduction to Contract Lifecycle Management

Docusign’s annual webinar event, Digital Day, was a big hit. You can catch-up on all the action or read on for our recap of the fourth and final session: ‘An introduction to Contract Lifecycle Management’, where Docusign’s Marc Breytenbach speaks with one of our customers about their experience in implementing Docusign CLM.

Are you still using Word and email for your contracts? While this is certainly a great step forward from paper-based contracts and snail-mail, there’s so much more you can do to enhance your contracting processes. From email automation to negotiating documents, Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) can improve productivity, reduce errors and ultimately provide better customer experiences.

Despite the clear benefits of digitisting more stages of your contracting lifecycle, the steps before and after signing documents have been largely left un-digitised in many businesses. Preparation, review, negotiation and ongoing management is often done manually. It’s a complex, in-and-out workflow that includes a range of tasks, people and platforms. And, if it’s still done in Word and via email, it’s bound to cause issues like:

• Delayed deals — >30 hours of work required to complete an average contract

• Increased costs – 9% revenue impact of poor contract management

• Wasted time – 60% of businesses waste time reworking contracts due to errors

• Increased risk – 96% of businesses say human error impacts the contracting process

Docusign CLM solves these pains. From contract generation through to negotiation and drafting, then finding and storing contracts, it applies a powerful mix of automation, legally-approved templates, and central storage to take the whole agreement process to the next level.

How one customer transformed contracting with Docusign CLM

Joining us in the webinar was Chrisanne Stamoulise, Group Commercial Services Director at International SOS, a global health and security services firm. Working with companies across the globe, the business runs on contracts. Having used Docusign eSignature for years already, it made sense to take things further by implementing Docusign CLM, too.  

As Chrisanne said, “For as long as I can remember, we had Docusign eSignature, which has worked remarkably well for us as an organisation, because we have multiple offices globally, and it was just a fantastic tool to use for signing your contracts. We had a previous vendor for contract management and they weren’t integrated, so we moved to Docusign CLM so we could have one integrated workflow.

“What did that mean for our end users? It meant they were just in one platform, generating contracts, negotiating contracts, and then sending them off to a signature — all in one tool.”

Since implementing Docusign CLM, International SOS has automated the contract process to help improve customer and employee experiences and streamline the contracting process in general. Adoption rates have been sky-high — around 87% — and internal users have been blown away by how easy it is to manage all aspects of the contract lifecycle. Collaboration is much easier, as is compliance and governance.

To ensure successful implementation, the International SOS team appointed Docusign CLM champions throughout the business, and also made sure to have CLM administrators and technical experts on-hand to iron out any bugs during the roll-out. They also provided team training and rigorous change management to expedite adoption.

“For our internal customers, it’s a win-win. And the CEO of our largest region took it upon himself to act as a customer to see what the experience was like for our customers. And he said it was actually the easiest task to do. Overally, we’ve had really positive results,” said Chrisanne.

Docusign CLM is built for businesses of all sizes

Docusign helps companies of all sizes — and across all industries — get started with CLM. You can start small with Docusign Gen, and then as your needs evolve you can deploy more advanced CLM solutions. To find out what’s right for you, get in touch for an obligation-free chat. 

To learn more about how Docusign is helping businesses transform, catch up on the other blogs in our Digital Day series or watch all the webinars on-demand now.