When your team is responsible for issuing numerous contracts to numerous suppliers, keeping records organized becomes a difficult task, increasing the risk of oversights and compliance violations. Authorium’s Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) centralizes your contract management and makes workflows more manageable for your users throughout the entire lifecycle of the contract. This article will familiarize you with key aspects of CLM on Authorium’s platform.
A CD&E Stage can be added to workflow configurations for Project Templates, just as you would add any other stage to the workflow. This stage contains a wide range of functionality to assist you and your team in contract management. The following features are available in this stage:
A Contract Package View mode enables you to add project documents or upload other documents to the contract package, where they
Here, you can view, add, remove, and reorder any of the documents in the contract package.
You can add, edit, or remove participants
You can assign signature blocks to participants
You will automatically send email notifications to Approvers when requesting their Approval
Managers can mark the stage as complete, which sends the contract to the Contract Repository. Managers may also manually input contract information.
You will see supplier-provided documents updated to display changes to uploaded workbooks and documents.
Recipients have an approval and signature view, which contains:
Signature block navigation
A table of contents
A signature modal
To add a CD&E workflow stage to a project template, first start from the Configuration screen.
The main view on a CD&E workflow stage in the Contract Document Package, which allows you to centrally manage all of the contract-essential documents for any given project.
To add a document to the Contract Document Package, starting from the Project Workflow screen:
After adding or uploading documents, they can be viewed by clicking on them in the Contract Document Package table.
Naturally, contract development requires more than just documents - we also need people to represent the different parties to the contract. The Authorium platform calls these people ‘participants’, and they are managed as part of the CD&E stage.
To add a participant to a contract, start on the Project Workflow screen of a project in the CD&E stage, and then:
You can also assign participants to signature blocks for them to sign. We will cover that in the next section.
Authorium has provided additional contract management functionality in the form of Signature Blocks, which allows contract documents to be signed fully within the Authorium ecosystem. Contracts can be signed directly through Authorium’s platform, but these enhancements will also extend to PDF Form Fill documents.
Signature Blocks can be added to forms or to collaborative documents. In forms, signature blocks behave as simply another type of field.
When added to collaborative documents, signature blocks have additional functionality. Specifically, signature blocks:
Can only be completed during an active CD&E stage.
Can be placed between sections of the document.
Can be labeled for easy reference throughout the project.
Have specific ‘associated fields’ linked to them (text and/or date) which can be linked to project variables. These variables store the field’s input once the signature block is signed and completed.
Typically, you will want to add two associated fields, one for the signee’s name, and one for the date of signing.
To add a signature block to a document, starting with the document open in Authorium:
On the navigation bar, selecting the Contracts tab pulls up the Contract Repository, where you can find all of the information related to your team’s contracts.
By default, you will see the Active Contracts view with details for individual contracts. There are also tabs for Purchase Orders and the contracts Archive.
The Active Contracts view shows the following information for each contract:
Contract Number
Name
Supplier
Expiration Date
Amount
Clicking on the name of the supplier will take you to the relevant Supplier Details page.
Clicking on the name of the contract itself will take you to the Contract Details screen for that contract, which includes supplier contact info, additional details on the contract itself, and a view of all contract documents.
These contract documents include all officially signed and executed documents, the Contract Document Package, and any documents provided by the Supplier.
To edit contract details, starting from the Active Contracts view: