Start with small changes – optimise your working day with contract management software

We’ve been living through a strange few years, none stranger than the COVID era. Coming out the other side – well, mostly – we all breathed a collective sigh of relief and expected things to get back to normal fairly quickly. But what is normal, exactly?

Our working practices have not returned to pre-pandemic status. Although a lot of previously office-based workers are now spending some of their working hours back on site, we are now well and truly entrenched in the age of the hybrid worker.

For many, this is good news. We can save time and money without the grind of the daily commute, we can claw back time with our families, and the communications platforms that we use every day for our virtual meetings replicate an onsite experience as far as is possible.

There are some downsides of course. In a world that’s always online, the lines between home and work become blurred. Weirdly, this makes us more time-poor. We’re also now responsible for personally ensuring that we have enough heat and light to work comfortably during the day. So the money we’ve saved on the one hand without the daily commute, is being redistributed on the other to power our working environments.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, the impact was immediate for Ukrainians but in its continuing aftermath we’ve all felt the effects, as they ripple across the world. Supply chain disruption is the most obvious consequence of Russia’s actions, exacerbated by the stringent sanctions it imposed on many who loudly opposed the invasion.

The effects on our living costs have been profound. We’re not yet living in an era of sustainable power, and as our planet’s population continues to expand, there’s greater demand for the fossil fuels we seek to move away from, as supply shrinks.

Close to home, prices for oil, gas and electricity have effectively tripled. Stories of pensioners shivering in the dark sound like the stuff of nightmares but that’s the reality of life for some in 21^st century Britain. Inflation is rocketing, wages have shrunk, public sector workers are striking, and more people are visiting food banks than ever before. These are shocking statistics at a time when digital transformation should be making our lives easier, not harder.

As we consider the impact of chat GTP and the wider concerns of global IT leaders about the potentially uncontrollable expansion of AI, automation is generally having a bad rap. For most of us however, our experience of automation is positive. When it comes to the automation of tedious manual and time-consuming tasks, we’re all for it. It makes us – and our working lives – more productive. Anything that can boost our faltering economy and put us on the path to recovery is a good thing.

As our business world expands thanks to globalisation, contracts become more important, and contract management software can support seamless and error-free business practices.

Full contract lifecycle management from Contract Insight, Four’s preferred contract management software solution offers:

• easier contract authoring with the seamless merging of contracts with templates from an organisation’s pre-approved clause and template library
• a centralised system for contract negotiation, contract collaboration and party review
• automated key date notifications and alerts for greater accountability
• robust risk assessment, risk mitigation and risk analysis tools
• robust process configuration and tracking for specific contract types for a wide variety of industries.

Contract Insight from Four Business Solutions

Contract Insight is a cloud-hosted (SaaS) or deployed (on-premise) contract management solution.  It’s trusted by thousands of professionals for their contract management, document management, procurement and sourcing needs.  Used by many Fortune 500 companies, Contract Insight gives you real time visibility into your contracts. It helps you meet contract compliance regulations, centralise your contract management and improve your overall contract administration process. It will free up your staff, so they can use their time more productively – an important step on our collective road to recovery.

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.