Organisations in the energy industry have to manage high numbers of high-value vendor and supplier contracts while remaining compliant and avoiding contract lifecycle bottlenecks. With increasingly stringent regulatory compliance standards and regulations, the energy sector encounters a myriad of challenges while trying to ensure full contract compliance and navigate the contract lifecycle quickly and effectively.
Energy industry contract management challenges
Without a scalable contract management solution, energy sector organisations could feasibly expose themselves to unnecessary risk such as:
- missed key dates
- lost pre and post-award opportunities
- disorganised document management
- workflow task delays
- insufficient certification tracking
- overlooked clauses
- elevated risk of data breaches
- slip-ups around compliance and regulations that can lead to penalties and hefty fines.
If you’re in the energy industry and anxious to avoid any of the problems listed above, a contract management software solution can help you maintain compliance, cut contract lifecycle bottlenecks, decrease risk and increase revenue.
Contract Insight from Four Business Solutions
Contract Insight provides you a branded portal, and the opportunity to upload and store a virtually unlimited number of documents and information, such as:
- compliance requirements, regulations and standards
- certificates of compliance
- certificates of insurance
- business certifications etc.
Once you’ve uploaded a file, you can create automated workflow alerts for your suppliers based on the key dates for all your important documents, keeping your stakeholders up to date with any action required on related documentation and certificates etc.
Unified clause library
Contract Insight offers a consolidated clause library that can help your business produce compliant, accurate and timely contracts and documents. Energy sector contract management teams can manage multiple document templates and versions thanks to pre-approved clauses and data fields. Clause libraries can be used for industry-specific templates such as regulatory citations and notes, and you can export all documents into standard file formats such as MS Word documents and PDFs.
Energy industry companies should take advantage of advanced contract authoring with clause swapping through an approved clause playbook and expedite the creation of contracts.
Intelligent contract workflow
Contract Insight offers intelligent contract workflow that helps energy sector organisations avoid contract lifecycle bottlenecks by keeping the right people notified and alerted at the right time thanks to automated alerts, notifications and task reminders. It gives you access to contract process management, dynamic and user-defined fields, full audit trails, reporting tools and much more.
You can easily keep track of your whole contract lifecycle with negotiations, collaboration and reporting tools. Additionally, audit trail history gives you an up-to-date record of changes to a contract.
Energy organisations should apply automated workflows for increased accountability, shorter contract-to-close rates and assurance that compliances and key dates have been met.
Data protection with VISDOM AI
In the energy industry, organisations need to preserve and protect their data as well as the data of associated vendors, industries, and sub-contractors. It’s important that you can identify sensitive data such as payment card information (PCI) and personally identifiable information (PII), so that compromised security and compliance issues are avoided.
VISDOM AI, an artificial intelligence tool, can help Contract Insight administrators identify and secure contract data types such as names, email addresses, phone numbers, dates, locations, counterparties and other key information. This functionality helps organisations decide which sensitive data should be redacted from a contract. With VISDOM, Contract Insight administrators can select data types and delineate rules for security of, and access to those data points based on contract types. When these rules are put in place, they can be automated with the help of VISDOM, promoting security, reducing financial losses, improving an organisation’s reputation and eliminating wasted time performing monotonous data import analysis.
Flip the switch to Contract Insight
If an energy sector organisation is ready to take charge of compliance management, stay on top of key dates and opportunities, optimise workflow, properly manage vendor certifications and forms, protect data, draft contracts and documents faster, and experience real-time contract visibility, then it’s time to use Contract Insight.
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 & Operations, across a broad range of industries.