What’s Your Agreement Process Costing You? Find Out with Our Assessment

Agreements are often the culmination of negotiations, the formalisation of partnerships and the foundation of crucial business operations. These moments should signify progress and security and evoke feelings similar to a runner taking a victory lap, but for many contracting professionals, the agreement process is instead fraught with anxiety and inefficiency. This arises from fragmented, manual systems, an overwhelming back-and-forth cycle of emails and attachments during reviews, and time-consuming redlining workflows.

If managing agreements feels more like an uphill battle than a strategic function for your legal team, it's likely that it's costing your organisation significant resources and increasing risk.

Inefficient agreement management has substantial consequences: a joint study by Deloitte and Docusign revealed it costs companies a staggering $2 trillion globally and accounts for 55 billion hours of wasted time each year. This translates directly into delayed deals, increased exposure to risk and squandered productivity that directly affects your bottom line.

However, a different reality is possible. Organisations that adopt advanced agreement management solutions reported improved compliance, reduced turnaround times and enhanced collaboration. The key to this transformation lies in replacing outdated methods with intelligent, automated agreement workflows.

The Docusign Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) platform offers a solution tailored to agreement complexities. By integrating AI throughout the agreement lifecycle — from drafting and negotiation to secure storage and insightful analysis — IAM empowers teams to streamline operations, strengthen compliance and unlock strategic value. It transforms agreements from potential roadblocks into powerful enablers of business success.

How do you know if you need Intelligent Agreement Management?

The fundamental question isn't whether your agreement process can be improved, but how much more efficient and less risky it can be, and where your team should focus its efforts. Our agreement management maturity assessment is specifically designed to help you find answers to these questions. It's a targeted diagnostic tool that evaluates your current agreement processes against industry best practices, highlighting specific areas where IAM can help your organisation significantly improve its process and agreement risk profile.

This assessment will guide you through the five critical stages of agreement management maturity, assisting you in identifying the indicators of a manual, outdated system within your contracting workflow. Here’s a breakdown of each stage, along with solutions that IAM offers to the most common — and costly — challenges.

The five stages of agreement management maturity

Drafting the contract

Does your team often start creating a contract from a template found on a shared drive (or someone’s individual hard drive) leading to potential inconsistencies, outdated clauses and version control issues right from the start of a new agreement? This is commonplace, unfortunately, and can create multiple issues at the beginning. 

How IAM helps: IAM provides secure, centralised libraries of pre-approved templates with dynamic fields, so that consistent, up-to-date agreements can be generated quickly and accurately to avoid manual delays and errors. Using pre-approved templates helps make sales teams self-sufficient and saves legal time from reviewing the same standard clauses over and over again. In fact, 55% of organisations are more likely to report outperforming financial goals thanks to advanced contract creation capabilities.

Routing the agreement for review

Often, agreement reviews are bogged down by endless email chains, which can cause issues with tracking version control, managing comments from multiple stakeholders and ensuring all necessary approvals are obtained efficiently. This can inevitably lead to errors and a much longer process overall.

How IAM helps: IAM automates review workflows, provides a centralised platform for collaboration and feedback and offers audit trails to track key changes and approvals, accelerating the review process and improving transparency. In fact, 47% of respondents to the Deloitte study reported outperforming their financial goals thanks to advanced routing, editing and approval capabilities.

Collecting signatures

Does your team spend significant time chasing signatures and lack real-time visibility into the status of agreements awaiting execution? This can lead to delays and potential deal slippage.

How IAM helps: With IAM, changes are tracked and real-time status updates are provided for everything from signature progress to renewal reminders, streamlining the execution process for agreements.

Storing agreements

Once completed, are agreements scattered across various systems, shared drives or even physical files, making it difficult to locate specific contracts, track key terms and manage obligations?

How IAM helps: Inside IAM is a secure, centralised and searchable repository for all executed agreements. AI-powered features automatically categorise agreements and extract key data, facilitating efficient contract lifecycle management and allowing for future process optimisation.

Analysing agreements

Relying on manual tracking for things as critical as contract renewal or expiry is no way to effectively manage agreements. Plus, there’s no way to analyse your contract portfolio to identify potential risks and opportunities for optimisation or to ensure compliance when everything is managed manually.

How IAM helps: With Docusign Iris, IAM’s AI-powered engine, you can track key dates, monitor compliance requirements and generate insightful reports on your agreement portfolio without any manual work. In fact, 31% outperform strategic goals thanks to advanced obligation and renewal management capabilities.

For each of these steps, our assessment provides targeted insights into your company’s operational efficiency and risk exposure. You’ll receive a detailed analysis for each stage, clearly highlighting areas of strength and recommended areas of attention and modernisation through IAM.

Take the first step towards Intelligent Agreement Management

Stop letting outdated processes impede your business. Investing a few minutes in our agreement management maturity assessment can be the start of a more intelligent, efficient and strategic contracting process. You’ll receive:

• An insightful diagnosis of your agreement process health, stage by stage.

• An understanding of the opportunity for business process upgrades.

• Recommended next steps, showing you how Docusign IAM can effectively help address identified pain points.

Take the agreement management maturity assessment now.