Contract Management Conversion Tip with Contract Guardian

Contract Management Conversion Tip with Contract Guardian

Notifications via email is certainly the default approach for most contract management systems.  However, it is not very effective if the email is undeliverable.  On a day to day basis, Contract Guardian automatically monitors delivery, bounces, click through, etc.  Obviously, those checks are performed after the delivery attempt is made.

Here is a proactive tip that can be incorporated into one of your conversion steps and annual house cleaning chores for contract management.  I will use a healthcare contract management environment for my example:

Steps

1. One time step: Create email notification in Contract Guardian that is sent to all parties in the system.  This will include internal hospital employees as well outside vendors, etc.  Identify the email as a test and tell the recipient no action is required.
2. One time step: Create agreement.  Link all parties in the system to the agreement.  Select only the email notification that was created in step 1.  Define the agreement as auto renewal with an increment of 1 year per renewal.  Trigger the notification 1 day prior to expiration.
3. Automatic: Contract Guardian will automatically monitor for any undeliverable "hard bounce" emails that indicate  that either the hospital / vendor employee is no longer with the organization or it was entered incorrectly. 
4. Annual: Make your corrections/additions/deletions and Contract Guardian is set to automatically do your annual checkup going forward..

Example of Rejected Emails

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About Contract Guardian

Contract Guardian – Contract Management software has been a key part of our overall success. Hospitals and healthcare were the first clients to leverage this powerful product and then it spread to other industries (Finance, Technology, Legal, Government, Manufacturing, etc.)

Contract Guardian – Contract Management has established an exceptional reputation for client service and quality of solution.  Client satisfaction is fundamental to Contract Guardian and is our top priority.

Learn more about Contract Guardian by calling 513.977.4544 or request a demo.

Contract Management – What to do next?

Contract Management - What to do next?

Contracts and their associated tasks change constantly. How do contract managers know what to do next? The Contract Guardian solution offers easy-to-use ways to manage, track, remind and notify you at every turn in the life-cycle of a contract.

Contract Management Dashboard

The first place is on the Contract Guardian dashboard that is configured specifically to the user profile.  As a contract manager, several important information streams are immediately available:

• Announcements – This is both internal and external contract management update announcements
• Contract Journal Feed – You will see a stream of the most recent activities where you have responsibility.
• Recent Contracts – The five (5) most recent contracts that you have visited are shown with an immediate link to the agreement.
• Upcoming Contract Deadlines – Seeing a graphical representation of deadlines for the next 6 months can be very informative.  Example: A hospital contract manager might see the upcoming physician employee agreement renewals for which they are responsible.
• Contract Profile Chart – All of the contract types are summarized into a pie chart with the number of each type being displayed.

Contract Guardian Primary Contracts Tab

Contract Managers usually spend a majority of their day on the main page.  Here is where they can filter, search, sort and organize all of their agreements.  One quick and easy tool to keep you up to speed is your favorites.  Simply click on the star next to any agreement and it will become one of your favorites.  Now, a punch list of work is available without even searching.

Contract Notifications

Contract Notifications – Contract Guardian has some of the most comprehensive capabilities in the contract management industry.

• Unlimited Email notifications with mail merge capabilities triggered by  core and user defined fields
• Task email notifications
• Work Flow assignments & notifications
• Delivery monitoring of contract email alerts – read article Contract Management Software – After the Email Alerts

Documents with Tasks

Documents with Tasks Tab shows you all of the contracts that have outstanding tasks.  Click on the task(s) associated with the agreement and you will see all of the details.  Not sure which contract has an outstanding task, simply click on the tab for Documents with Task.  One can sort and filter the task by fields such as due date, assigned to, task type, title, etc. read article Contract Management Software – After the Email Alerts

My Tasks

My Tasks – Provides a detailed breakdown of tasks that are specifically for you.  You can see the unique grid views that divided into Outstanding, Closed and a Calendar View. You can also create a new task from here as well.  (A task email can optionally be sent upon creation) 

Contract Task Tab

Contract Task Tab –This pull out tab is accessed from any page in the system.  It will pull out and you can see any of your tasks.  In addition, you can select and close the tasks directly from the tab as well access complete task management.  

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About Contract Guardian

Contract Guardian – Contract Management software has been a key part of our overall success. Hospitals and healthcare were the first clients to leverage this powerful product and then it spread to other industries (Finance, Technology, Legal, Government, Manufacturing, etc.)

Contract Guardian – Contract Management has established an exceptional reputation for client service and quality of solution.  Client satisfaction is fundamental to Contract Guardian and is our top priority.

Learn more about Contract Guardian by calling 513.977.4544 or request a demo.

Contract Guardian Delivers Integrated Support

The Integrated Support for Contract Guardian is designed to put the user in control.  We offer three (3) integrated tools for support/communication for your contract management system.

Report an Issue is accessed via the Tab at the top center of every page in Contract Guardian.  The screen capture below shows you that once you click report an issue, you will be presented with the opportunity to describe the situation as well as sending a screen captures if available.  In addition, name and email is requested so that we can respond accordingly.  The  submission goes directly to our support team and developers for resolution.

Support Button provides you with the details of how to reach support via phone and video conference support (Share screen and application).  It also describes the other support mechanisms available.  An ever growing inventory of contract management videos can be accessed directly from here as well.

Feedback Button delivers a generic way to communicate with everyone on the Contract Guardian Team.  Send us a compliment, request, complaint or any other type of message.  Everything is reviewed by Management, Marketing, Sales, Development & Support.

Learn more about Contract Guardian by calling 513.977.4544 or request a demo.

Contract Management Software - After the Email Alerts

Contract Guardian features a simple and elegant feature for Email Alerts. Contract Guardian monitors emails to check if emails are bouncing and if emails are opened. The average Contract Management Software does not include these features. They typically describe their Email alerts with a description similar to the following:

Receive timely email alerts of expiry dates and any other contract deliverable deadlines.
Adding workflows to your system will then automatically inform the user of the next step in the process.  Include digital signatures to your contract workflow and you have a very through cycle.   

Unfortunately, there are still several holes in the previous process where the information falls through without important monitoring.

One of these holes is monitoring emails that bounce.  Here is a real world scenario where Contract Guardian allowed us to react to a bad email address in the system.  A healthcare organization was sending alerts from their account to a single responsible party on a contract.  Contract Guardian monitoring flagged the email when it received a bounce notification from the system.  A quick call determined that the email address belonged to a former employee.  The tracking of this situation allowed the Contract Guardian Administrator to update the contract and remove the user email from the system.  Tracking and notifying the administrator of Out of Office or On Vacation “soft bounces” will help the compliance people know that no activity is taking place at the moment.

Another one of these holes is that there is no way to tell if the email was opened or if the user clicked on any links in the email to take an appropriate action on a contract.  Your contract management system needs to monitor all of this and make the appropriate alerts/notifications.  Here is a typical account showing the Opens vs. Clicks.

The next contract management software email alert chart reflects overall activity for a snapshot of time.  You will notice that for this account, 110 emails were delivered and 2 were bounced.  Filtering by the bounce provide you with the problem email addresses.

Here is a summary of items you should monitor from your contract management software system after the email alert is sent:

Filter Data by:

• Delivered
• Rejected
• Spam Complaints
• Unsubscribed
• Hard Bounces
• Soft Bounces
• Deferred

United States (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Analysis Reporting to Consider

• Compare opens clicks and delivery stats between different groups of emails, based on your own custom search filters.
• Demographic analysis:
• Locations – Country, State, City, etc.
• Email Clients: Chrome, Outlook, Mobile Safari, etc
• Operating System: Windows 7, Windows 8, Android, IOS, etc.

Learn more about Contract Guardian by calling 513.977.4544 or request a demo.

Contract Management email notifications with mail merge available in Contract Guardian

Use mail merge to create email notifications for Contract Managements

You use mail merge when you want to create a more professional and personal email notification within Contract Guardian.  For example: If you are a hospital that wishes to create a personalized notification of a physician agreement that will lapse, you could include within the body of the notification all core fields and user defined fields for that contract type.

The mail merge process for contract management email notifications uses the following overall steps:

1. Set up the main contract notification document. The main document contains the text and graphics that are the same for each version of the merged document — for example, the name of the other party.  (Physician, Vendor, Company, etc.).
2. Insert the fields into the notification template.   Using the email notification system, select the field you wish to show in the email and insert it into the body of the document.   For example, the names and addresses of the vendor.
3. Contract Guardian does the rest.  It will automatically trigger the notifications and deliver it to the appropriate individuals based on the rules of the notification.  
4. Note: This is a onetime process.  Once you setup an email notification and provide the merged fields, you can set it and forget it.  

Below is an illustration of the merge field integration process:

Learn more about Contract Guardian by calling 513.977.4544 or request a demo.

Contract Management Release Update 2014-01-26

On January 26, the development team for Contract Guardian released several updates to help enhance the Contract Management Software.

This most recent update of Contract Guardian contains two (2) new features and around a dozen performance tweaks and bug fixes. New Features Added:

'Notifications' tab to the Documents page that allows users with the appropriate permissions to toggle on/off various types of email notifications sent on a per document basis. Previously this functionality was possible through the 'Contract Info' tab on the Documents page, but we felt the implementation could be improved upon to create a more desirable user experience.



Added Account based announcements These are announcements will only be displayed for users under the account that created the announcement. This is in addition to the global announcements on the contract management dashboard.  A number of our healthcare contract management clients wanted additional granularity in the dashboard communication.

We have also added a dozen performance tweaks and some minor bug fixes.  Performance tweaks and bug fixes.

Feedback to Contract Guardian is available on every page of the application.  The requests are routed to the team.  They utilize Agile Development for Hosted Contract Management:  A few of the advantages for our clients include:

1. High degree of collaboration between our client and the development team
2. Predictable Delivery
3. Rapid Change
4. Focus on value for clients
5. Quality and Performance Improvement

Contact Contract Guardian to learn more. 

Related articles

• The Role of a Contract Manager: 2014 update

Contract Management - Choosing the Right Tool for the Job

Often people feel the best tool is the one they know.  That being said, it is not surprising that when it comes to Contract Management you see a number of tools being used that just don’t really match the needs of a true contract management system.  Some examples include:

1. File Cabinets - allow me to emphasize that yes, it is still very common to see contracts managed or should I say mismanaged by putting them in a file cabinet.

• Lost and misplaced documents
• Only one person can use it at a time
• No alert mechanism
• If you have a fire…good luck

2. Excel Spreadsheet – This is a nice place to start for an organization that has a central person that manages all contracts and only needs very limited functionality. However, they do have numerous limitations

• Don’t trigger important actions to be taken
• Very cumbersome and requires significant time and labor to keep current
• Prone to human error since this is not tied to a database that can be used for data integrity
• Sharing is a challenge and don’t count on using it effectively over the Internet
• Searching your data and the actual documents and attachments will be slow and exhausting

3. CRM Systems and tools like SharePoint are good examples of using the wrong tool for the job.  They are good products, but are not designed to address contract management requirements.  To paraphrase Abraham Maslow, "If all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail".

4. Other Contract Management Systems

• There are a number of these and many have a price tag that is difficult to justify. Yes, they can deliver a great deal of functionality.  Finding the right balance can be a bit daunting.  A few items for your consideration Very challenging installation and long learning curve for the users
• Delivers numerous features that you will never use (It is a little like getting an elephant for free…you still have to feed it and clean up afterwards)
• Add on charges often occur for what other vendors might include:
• Extra when you add additional contracts and or users
• Fees to pull your own data out of the system
• Charges to use a Tablet or Smartphone with the system
• Ongoing consulting services that are often provided from other vendors as part of their support model

Feature Rich, Intuitive Contract Management at a Reasonable Price

Thankfully for you, a perfect balance now exists in contract management software  that delivers the features you need, intuitive to use and at a reasonable price.  Are you ready to get rid of your file cabinet?  Think it is time to stop wasting your time with Excel or your money with a very expensive solution?  Say hello to professional contract management software that works in the cloud or on premise.  Learn how you can make this happen with intuitive contract management software at http://www.contractguardian.com.