The sheer volume of contracts to be migrated to a Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) system is immense in a corporate environment. The requisite to digitize them is indeed overwhelming for the decision-makers and their legal teams since it involves considerable investment and a lot of nuances, such as:

• Analyzing the varied types of contracts existing within an organization
• Taking stock of several phases in the end-to-end migration process
• Define the goals to be achieved
• Evaluating the efficiency of contract management systems that best fit the specified needs
• Creating a team of experts for error-free execution of all the tasks
• Setting the quality parameters and security protocols

A mere list of to-do for legacy contract migration itself appears to be time-consuming and labor-intensive. The magnitude of actual work can only be measured when commenced in a real-time environment. Getting an in-house team for CLM implementation can dilute the priorities and deviate them away from core responsibilities, affecting some key aspects of business operations.

Considering the intricacies in CLM implementations and the need for mitigating the challenges, managed legal service providers such as Cenza have introduced Contract Consulting Services to ease the decision-making process.

How can Contract Migration Consulting add value?

Consultants are well-experienced in every aspect of CLM implementation, such as contract discovery, digitization, extraction, and contracts data transformation, as they have been a part of several such migration projects. Hence, they have a clear understanding of a contract ecosystem in a corporate organization and the best possible way to implement it for every unique setup.

When a business team, which has pre-defined the requirements, works together with a contract migration consulting team, who is thorough with the entire migration cycle, the collaboration can better understand both teams.

Harnessing their years of experience in process engineering/improvement, technology implementation, and project/program management for legacy contract management, the consultants would formulate the right strategy and develop a plan to ensure the most effective data migration. Given their strong expertise in the migration process, the consultants can help identify the possible locations of contacts within an organization, including the online system, Salesforce, contract archives, business stakeholders, suppliers, and physical repositories.

As part of the consulting, existing contract types will be reviewed and validated for relevance. The team will provide recommendations on the right contract data fields to be extracted and loaded to enhance the efficiency of the identified CLM system (as detailed in this blog). The consultants can also provide an insight into linking dependent contracts, such as framework agreements, work orders, and consolidating documents to form complete agreements (e.g., original agreements, variations, terminations, etc.). Yet another key guidance shared is regarding the metrics to track the success of a migration project, providing vivid details of the end-to-end process.

What are the benefits derived?

The first and foremost benefit is the clarity in the business team on the next steps to successfully initiate legacy contract migration. This exempts the uncertainty and congregates the efforts in evaluating the possible options for the migration, such as:

• Availability of the right tools within the organization
• Expertise and experience of the in-house team
• Knowledge of every phase of migration
• A scale to define quality parameters
• Time and resources required for the end-to-end process

The endeavor to find the answer for the above-listed requirements would provide an insight into the prevailing system and resource availability. This will galvanize the decision-makers to arrive at the best result-yielding approach within their specified timeline. If the option of involving an in-house team seems not feasible, the wiser call is to partner with a CLM implementation service provider for:

• Renaming of documents as per the recommended naming convention
• Execution of de-duplication and OCR process
• Sorting of all the documents as per the organization’s requirements
• Multi-level review by trained Quality Assurance experts to ensure maximum accuracy
• Successful migration of contracts to derive insights for informed decisions, automated contract renewal, and payment notification to ensure utmost compliance

This article endeavors to help business organizations understand the significance of Initial Consulting for legacy contract migration. It might appear as one simple part but skipping it might not help the stakeholders decide on the migration.

If you are looking for a reliable contraction migration consultant with proven experience, talk to the experts at Cenza. We would be glad to assist you in easing the end-to-end data migration. To contact us, click here.