Visionary tools for building CLM success
Contract Insight® Enterprise Version 17.8.0 has arrived, delivering visionary features and enhancements to supercharge your contract management software suite.
In order to help your organisation successfully meet and exceed contract management, vendor management, eProcurement and eSourcing goals, future-minded features and enhancements have been added to Contract Insight for an impressively low-friction, scalable, and user-friendly software experience. Such valuable assets include:
- robust and user-friendly contract task management tools
- centralised and organised contract data oversight
- enhancements to our proprietary contract management artificial intelligence engine – VISDOM AI®
- a myriad of contract document management enhancements across several Contract Insight system areas
- enriched contract authoring and contract clause management processes
- streamlined and user-friendly contract searching processes
- seamlessly integrated contracts and contract requests
- improved vendor management software processes
- useful updates to the PC Helper Apps for MS Word and MS Outlook.
Get started today by utilising powerful innovations to our acclaimed contract lifecycle management software solution. Here’s what you need to know about our industry-leading, must-see features…
Oversight of contract data with automated duplicate data entry checks
Contract Insight 17.8.0 users can configure record data fields to be marked as unique. This means that users are afforded greater control with notifications when a data field marked as unique is entered on more than one record. This feature is available for the main core areas for record creation:
- contracts
- requests
- solicitations
- purchase orders
- employees
- and companies.
For demonstrational purposes, we will mark the record data field “Contract Title” as unique in our field manager, so that we are notified when a Contract Title is entered that is already located within the system.
Once the above field configuration setting is saved, your helpful and user-friendly contract management software system will alert you of a duplicate data entry if the Contract Title you choose already exists.
To demonstrate, we will attempt to enter “XYZ Consulting Agreement” (a Contract Title that we know already exists within the system).
As we can see, our duplicate Contract Title – XYZ Consulting Agreement – has been prominently flagged as a duplicate, giving us powerful oversight over our contract management software process and the ability to avoid re-entering data that is already within the system (potentially causing confusion).
Users can also set multiple fields at a time as unique for a given record type in the Manage Fields By Type section of the system – making the process even quicker
VISDOM AI speed and text extraction improvements
With the release of Contract Insight 17.8.0, VISDOM AI OCR (optimal character recognition) and automated task extraction have been significantly enhanced in a myriad of user-friendly ways.
VISDOM achieves future-minded advancement in text extraction speed – with OCR processes transpiring at a rate of up to three to ten pages at a time rather than one at a time.
Contract Insight’s acclaimed contract intelligence engine offers several key options for text extraction, including:
- the option to “OCR NOW,” which commences the VISDOM AI text extraction process
- the option to “OCR and Notify,” which puts the VISDOM text extraction task in a queue and notifies the user when finished so that, meanwhile, they can focus on other tasks within the system
- the option to “Use Embedded Text,” or bypass the OCR process and use text that may be embedded in the document.
Users can also leverage VISDOM to update an existing record with the inclusion of a document that has undergone text extraction. From there, they can elect to use extracted fields or keep the current ones on a field-by-field basis – making the intelligent contract creation and text extraction processes convenient and highly configurable.
Easily upload documents with enhanced document library
With Contract Insight 17.8.0, the document library offers user-friendly “drag and drop” functionality similar to the feature introduced for Contracts, Requests, Purchase Orders, Vendor and Customer Records, Employee Records, and E-Sourcing Records in Contract Insight 17.5.0.
Users can drag and drop a contract document into the “Drop Files Here” section shown above to swiftly and easily upload documents without having to needlessly browse every time. From there, users can:
- manage and edit document information (such as the contract title, the collaboration type, whether or not the contract is active, a helping description, and more)
- upload additional new document versions for optimal document management version control
- easily determine the published version of a given document attachment.
- preview attached documents.
Enhanced contract authoring with improved contract and template merging
During the configuration of intelligent contract writing with the merging of contracts and templates from an organisation’s pre-approved clause library, advancements have been added with Contract Insight 17.8.0 to prevent users from encountering uncertain hurdles during the process.
In order to configure state-of-the-art rules and conditions for contract authoring within Contract Insight, users can first configure fields to merge between contracts and templates. If a user fails to do this Contract Insight has them covered.
If a user navigates to create rules and conditions without first establishing mergeable fields for intelligent clause merging, a warning message appears with a link for the user to promptly configure said mergeable fields – streamlining contract authoring and helping users to always stay on task with a centralised process.
Improved Contract Insight quick search experience
Contract Insight 17.8.0 expands its leading quick search functionality by displaying surrounding text around a search term found within a contract document. This helpful functionality can help users determine if a file is relevant to a search query by providing context to the search term. Users can streamline contract search processes without needing to preview or download entire documents to see if quick search text is relevant. Users can see:
- how many instances of the quick search term were found.
- the file name containing the quick search term.
- the file page number on which the quick search term is found.
- a preview of the context of the search term.
Seamless integration between contracts and requests
With the release of Contract Insight 17.8.0, users can seamlessly integrate key data between Requests and corresponding Contracts – with heightened control.
When using the Contract Insight Field Mapper (located in Account Maintenance), users have governance to pick and choose which data line items will be mapped from a Request to its subsequent, relevant Contract Record.
Contract Insight users have configuration oversight as to whether or not they would like sub table data fields to map automatically between Contracts and Requests or if they would prefer to choose sub table data fields to map manually. This feature gives users increased control over the configuration of data field mapping between Contracts and Requests.
Improved vendor management with robust vendor ratings and reviews
Experience powerful, centralised, and less biased vendor ratings and reviews with our vendor management software.
Contract Insight 17.8.0 users can enjoy permissions-based ratings and comments for each section of a completed vendor survey. Reviewers cannot see other reviews until they have submitted their own and, once submitted, their review cannot subsequently be altered after the fact. This helps reduce bias that can arise from seeing other reviews prior to leaving one’s own.
Once vendor survey reviews are submitted, they can be viewed by other reviewers to gain holistic insights into various organisations’ evaluations of vendors.
Diversify vendor rating and scoring options with export feature
Contract Insight 17.8.0 allows for users to easily export vendor rating and scoring details from an eSourcing record page within the system into an MS Excel spreadsheet format.
Once exported, information displays on the spreadsheet in an organized fashion for easy viewing, sharing, and storage of critical information.
Wizard-based vendor gateway registration
System admins can configure streamlined vendor gateway registration with an intuitive wizard in Contract Insight 17.8.0.
System admins can build each section and group for registration using Contract Insight’s wizard. The fields of each group can easily be configured by admins in a user-friendly and streamlined manner.
For reassurance and seeing their plan in action, system admins can view a preview of the vendor gateway registration process that they configured – from the registering vendor’s perspective.For readability and context, we filled in the vendor registration fields in the preview below:
A secure vendor gateway with multi-factor authentication
Contract Insight 17.8.0 system administrators can tighten the security of the Vendor Gateway by enforcing multi-factor authentication.
System administrators can:
- enable multi-factor authentication
- specify the method (email code only, SMS code only, email and SMS code, choice between email or SMS code)*
- choose the code style (caps only, alpha only, numeric only, a mixture of the three)
- choose code length (in characters)
- and configure the email message that is sent.
Our PC Helper App for MS Word and PC Helper App for MS Outlook have been improved for an even more powerful, seamless, and user-friendly integrated Contract Insight and desktop MS Office experience.
PC Helper App password save option
With Contract Insight 17.8.0, users of the MS Word PC Helper App have diversified login options. There is an option to save one’s password to bypass a continuous login prompt.
Combine documents for robust, cross-platform contract management
The PC Helper App for MS Word introduces the ability to “Combine Documents” on Contract Insight 17.8.0 for next-level cross-platform contract management software integration.
Once the “Combine Documents” button is selected within the Ribbon of MS Word, users can choose to either combine local documents or to combine Contract Insight documents. From there, there are several helpful options, including:
- combine system documents with the current document.
- combine documents found within a Contract Insight system record.
- and even combine documents across Contract Insight system records.
Once one of the above options is selected, users are afforded choices for saving the recent document combinations, including as: a PDF with tracked changes, an MS Word document with tracked changes, a PDF with changes hidden, and an MS word document with changes made accepted.
Better CLM workflow task awareness with robust alerts and notifications
With Contract Insight 17.8.0, Contract Insight’s Alerts and Notifications interface allows system users (with permission) to configure automated email notifications and alerts based off of their organisation’s needs – personalising Contract Insight workflow automation.
This user-friendly, application-level configuration can be leveraged for rules-based notifications for critical and success-driving tasks relating to Contracts, Bids/Solicitations, Vendors and Customers, and Purchase Orders.
Enjoy innovative and advanced task oversight with a superior contract lifecycle management workflow notifications and alerts process.
Get Started with Contract Insight 17.8.0
Contract management, vendor management, procurement, legal, sourcing and a wide array of other industry-leading professionals can leverage the tools for successful management of contracts, requests, purchase orders, vendor records and other key facets of source-to-contract management. Get started with Contract Insight 17.8.0 to take advantage of exciting new features and enhancements for source-to-contract management success.
Contract Insight from Four
Contract Insight is a cloud-hosted (SaaS) or deployed (on-premise) contract management solution. The acclaimed platform is trusted by thousands of professionals for their contract management, legal document management, procurement and sourcing needs. Used by many Fortune 500 companies, Contract Insight gives you real time visibility into your contracts. It doesn’t just shore up your security; it will help you meet contract compliance regulations, centralise your contract management and improve your overall contract administration process.
For more information, contact John O’Brien, CEO at Four Business Solutions, global business consultants and software integrators providing business processes improvements in Finance, Supply Chain and Operations, across a broad range of industries.