Do your eProcurement and contract management operate separately? It may be time to consider housing them in one software.
At Euna Procurement, we’ve had the opportunity to work with a lot of organizations that are passionate about finding the perfect eProcurement software that will bring their processes online, reduce their environmental impact, align stakeholders, and improve consistency. But why not bring those benefits to your contract management, too?
After all, sourcing and contract management are intrinsically connected; in one stage, you’re evaluating the best vendor. In the other, you’re tracking their performance and deciding whether it’s a relationship worth renewing.
At the end of the day, both have the same goal—to drive the most value for the goods or services you need. So why are you treating them as separate?
On today’s blog, we explore 5 reasons why managing your contracts in your eProcurement software is a good idea.
1. Automatically generate contracts from awarded proposals
You’ve spent a lot of time, energy, and resources to find the perfect candidate for your bid or RFP—now it’s time to create the contract. When your procurement and contract management are hosted together, all the data you need to generate a new contract is already there for you to pull from.
For example, in Euna Procurement, you can save time and ensure consistency by creating templates that are pre-configured to include the default details, documents, and people for a given contract type. Since vendor information is already stored in Euna Procurement, you can create a contract record that automatically carries over relevant information (such as public files from the original project and the awarded vendor’s submission documents) from the procurement project into the contract record.
2. Evaluate vendor performance
Sourcing and contract management operate in a cycle; first, you have to evaluate bids or RFPs to find the best vendor, then you work with that vendor, then you evaluate their performance, then you have to decide whether you continue that relationship or go back out to the market for that contract when it’s up for renewal—and the cycle starts again. So it makes sense that you would want to manage vendor performance in the same place where you host your strategic sourcing activities.
In Euna Procurement, for instance, users can create surveys to measure vendor performance, add respondents that will receive the survey, view survey results and frequency, export survey results, and view trends from past surveys to track improvement.
3. Track important milestones in your contract lifecycle management
Once you’ve evaluated the performance of your vendors, you’ll want to track important contract dates like lead time and end date so that you can prepare to renew contracts or go back to the market.
In Euna Procurement, a calendar heatmap provides you with a high-level view of important upcoming dates. Dark-color days signify more contracts expiring for greater values, allowing you to prioritize your time accordingly. You can set reminders on the lead times of relevant contracts to you.
Additionally, by selecting an individual contract you get a visual timeline of various terms of the individual contract, important dates, and custom reminders that you set for yourself.
4. Go green
Does your organization have a “digital transformation” or “go green” mandate that led you to invest in an eProcurement solution? You wouldn’t be alone; our friends at Ventura County transitioned from a paper-based procurement process to an eProcurement solution and saved 170,000 pages of paper in one year, reducing their environmental footprint (not to mention shredding costs!).
Why stop at procurement? With your contract management activities integrated into your eProcurement software, you can view contract information on a central dashboard, filter contracts to locate the information you need, and export custom reports to Excel—no physical paper required.
5. Share insights seamlessly
Many of us have invested in eProcurement solutions because we know the power that data and insights can have in making more proactive and strategic decisions. And the same goes for contract management!
In Euna Procurement, all the information you need is in one place and easily exportable. You can also give other users in your organization access to contract details (to view or edit), so all contract stakeholders are on the same page.