This weekend brings the long-awaited end to winter – in theory at least – as we spring forward into our favourite form of daylight saving. One less hour in bed is more palatable for most of us especially as this year it falls on the Easter weekend.

Spring still seems quite hesitant to make a permanent appearance – in the UK last week some of us have seen sleet and hail if not actually snow. Temperatures remain low but spirits are rising as we look forward to longer days, lighter evenings and maybe even a glimpse of that rare creature, spring sunshine.

Spring is for many the time to start afresh – spring cleaning, de-cluttering, tax affairs in order. There seems to be more time to do things as our circadian rhythms start to chime in with the longer days and we’re less inclined to hunker down or coorie in, as they say in Scotland.

A new year of growth

This inclination to clean up our respective acts extends into our workplaces or our workspaces, as well as our homes. For many businesses, April 5 is the start of Q1 as well as the new financial year and so it’s time to make some resolutions about how to ensure best practice in the workplace to support a new year of growth and profitability.

The advent of spring notwithstanding, tedious manual tasks can get us down, whether at home or in the workplace. Unless we can invent or invest in a robot to clean the house, the windows, the car etc, there’s not much scope for leveraging automation to take over the household chores. Thankfully we don’t have the same constraints in the workplace. Tedious manual time-consuming tasks are one thing that can be taken off our hands if we embrace automation in our business affairs.

Automation brings many benefits – not least freeing up your people to focus on really growing the business – but one indisputable advantage it brings is the stripping out of human error. When it comes to contract management you really can’t afford to make any mistakes, especially in increasingly litigious world, with onerous compliance and regulatory requirements.

Consider contract management software

This is where contract management software can really help protect and orchestrate your business operations. Spring seems a good time to get your contractual house in order and at Four Business we love to get the chance to talk to you about Contract Insight, from Cobblestone Software.

Contract Insight is a highly robust, scalable, web-based solution using advanced web and database technologies. It offers unprecedented flexibility and functionality to business users of all levels and organisations of all sizes. Contract Insight can be rapidly deployed, supported and maintained, hosted in a SaaS model or deployed on your organisation’s servers. It integrates easily with your existing systems, including Sun Systems and Oracle.  

This enterprise contract management system will help your organisation meet contract compliance regulations, centralise your contract and committal management, enable team collaboration and improve your overall contract administration process. It offers multi-level security, and your users can easily track tasks and milestones. Template based creation enables uniformity across your contracts and there are no attachment limitations. With quick custom and ad-hoc reporting, search time is reduced, and you can add user-defined fields to make sure it really works for you.

To find out more, contact John O’Brien, CEO at Four Business Solutions – global business consultants and software integrators specialising in business process improvement.