Businesses of all kinds rely on a variety of contracts every day. The details of sales, vendor relationships, professional services, and more are governed by contract language that can be intricate, complex, and unique. While creating these contracts, parties often generate multiple iterations, which they may need to share with various individuals throughout the company for review, edits, and approval. The process can easily stall when approval is needed to move forward or documents have gone through several versions over the course of negotiations and changes are not tracked consistently.
It's important to ensure these processes run smoothly and that employees can easily access information such as deadlines, renewal dates, and other key terms from finalized documents as needed. Efficient and reliable contract management software is essential for minimizing costs, capitalizing on opportunities for revenue generation, and reducing compliance risk. Contract management software simplifies these tasks and saves time for contract management teams. They can facilitate collaboration, speed the contract generation process, provide an easily searchable contract repository, create customized reports and alerts, and more.
When you must invest in a new software solution, efficiency and cost effectiveness are prime considerations. Businesses need tools that streamline operations, create cost savings, support productivity, and promote employee satisfaction, and they need to bring employees up to speed with new technology quickly, creating as little disruption as possible in day-to-day activities. By choosing a solution that integrates seamlessly with the technology employees already use, you can create an intuitive experience that promotes quick mastery and better implementation.
With millions of users around the globe, Microsoft 365 has become essential for businesses in all industries. More than a million businesses and well over a quarter billion users around the world rely on Microsoft 365 and the secure Azure cloud platform upon which it resides. As a result, Microsoft tools like SharePoint, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Word, and Teams as well as the Dynamics 365 platform have become integral to the way many organizations do business.
When your contract management software integrates natively with the technology your business already uses, employees can easily incorporate the software into their existing practices to simplify the entire contract management process, from research and negotiation through signature, storage, customized reporting, and ongoing easy access to documents. Rather than spending hours training on new technology, contract management teams can quickly start saving time by streamlining or even automating time-consuming tasks.
Contract management software that works in tandem with your company’s existing Microsoft 365 tools brings your team together, allowing leaders to provide precise, permission-based access for everyone who needs it throughout the contract lifecycle. Sales, legal, procurement, and executives can gain real-time access to the information they need, such as preapproved language, status updates, and performance data, using the tools they know and trust. Below are just some of the ways Microsoft 365 integration makes contract management simpler.
Microsoft 365 contract management integration allows employees to easily access, search, and share contract information from Microsoft Office apps like Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Teams. This makes it simpler to use data from emails, text documents, slideshows, spreadsheets, and other sources to inform contract management, helping ensure important information doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.
Integration with Microsoft’s SharePoint for contract management is a game-changer, since the document storage and collaboration platform provides robust search, metadata tagging, and version control features that provide the foundation for a reliable, easy-to-use repository. Its collaboration tools, customizable workflows, and automation capabilities help smooth the contract creation process, reducing errors while shortening the contract generation timeline. Further, its analytics and reporting features can help increase overall efficiency by providing important insights into contract compliance and performance.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a leading business applications platform that includes customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), AI, and other features that help companies operate more efficiently and effectively. Dynamics 365 supports not only sales professionals but also customer support, finance, supply chain management, and others. While it has some features that can simplify contract management, such as configurable workflows and e-signature capabilities, Dynamics 365 is not, on its own, an ideal solution for contract management. Paired with a robust contract management system that integrates tightly with the CRM and ERP solutions, however, it allows this wide range of workers to easily contribute to and access contract data as needed.
This tight integration can bring your teams together, allowing the systems to sync automatically as new data is added. Sales and procurement employees can create requests for contracts and other documents within Dynamics 365 as well as share documents created or stored in the platform. Because everything is housed within Azure, employees use their Azure Active Directory credentials to gain secure, permissions-based access to the information they need.
When your contract management software allows employees to simply and securely share data using a wide variety of Microsoft tools, anyone (or everyone) in your organization can contribute their unique knowledge and insight to the contract management process and benefit from the new insights that optimized contract management generates. Connecting employees with integrated technologies gives negotiators access to more data and analysis to guide contract decisions while lightening the burden on contract management teams to collect and manage that data. The impact of this simple innovation can be profound. Below are five important benefits that integration between your contract management software and Microsoft 365 can provide.
A centralized contract repository that integrates tightly with the Microsoft tools employees already use makes it easier than ever to organize, access, and even create and negotiate contracts. The repository serves as a single source of intelligence for detailed contract information. With this new visibility into your contract data, you can optimize negotiations, more effectively manage risk, and enhance compliance while spending less time on administrative tasks. The repository can maintain version control and track changes even as they come in from different parties using different apps.
Azure provides secure, cloud-based storage that helps ensure compliance with privacy laws and confidentiality policies throughout the contract lifecycle. At the same time, it can provide employees throughout your organization—from sales and procurement to distribution and customer service—access to the contract information they need when they need it, reducing reliance on contract management staff and empowering employees to make more informed decisions.
Integration with tools like Outlook, Word, Excel, SharePoint, and Teams helps organize communications and keep them on track. All communications related to a contract, regardless of format, can be easily tracked and organized in a central location, while workflows and automated alerts help keep the process moving forward.
When systems speak the same language, information flows freely between them. Contract management software that’s built for Microsoft 365 users can automatically sync with Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 tools, providing employees the most accurate, up-to-date contract information possible in real time. Integration saves time by eliminating the need to switch between apps to update contract information. Reminders can alert parties when it’s their turn to act, so you can spend less time creating contracts and more time profiting from them.
These days, companies are drowning in data. To be useful, data must be contextualized. When a robust contract management system integrates easily with your other business apps, it can create configurable reports that draw information from a variety of sources. For example, you could import data from the repository into Excel or Power BI to conveniently turn raw data into actionable performance and compliance insights.
When implementing a new contract management system, you want the process to be as frictionless as possible. When tools are intuitive and easy to use, employees adopt them more quickly and with greater competence. If you choose a contract management system that isn’t built for Microsoft 365 and the Azure cloud platform, the number of things that can go wrong increases dramatically. You’ll have to verify appropriate data security and compatibility between systems that will need to communicate with the software. You’ll also need to train employees on the new system, which could take hours of valuable time away from revenue-generating activities. After training, follow-up may be needed to ensure employees are using the technology appropriately to generate its expected ROI. A smoothly integrated solution smooths the implementation process, empowering you to generate greater return on your investment faster.
Contracts 365 is an end-to-end contract management software solution designed to integrate seamlessly with Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365, making it easy for employees to learn and use. Because it’s built specifically for Microsoft 365 users, it’s the ideal solution for harmonious integration with the Microsoft ecosystem. Browse our case studies to learn more about how Contracts 365 helps businesses like yours enhance collaboration, efficiency, and productivity while freeing contract management teams from time-consuming manual tasks.