Study: Three out of Four Businesses Must Adapt Core Processes to Keep up with the Demands of Modern Contracts 

SAN MATEO, Calif., June 1 2020 -- Conga announced new tools and resources from Forrester Consulting to help organizations more effectively create and manage contracts to successfully navigate the risks, obligations and opportunities facing their businesses.

The typical business creates, manages and executes more than 1,100 contracts every year -- 78% of which are customized. To understand more about how businesses manage the volume and velocity of their contracts, Conga commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate organizations’ contract lifecycle management (CLM) approaches, challenges and future plans.

Key findings of the Forrester Consulting study, “Reduce Risk and Improve Your Contract Velocity with a CLM Technology Solution,” include:

• Contracts take more than half a workweek to create and execute: While respondents believe it should take 1.2 days to execute a contract, the study found that businesses spend 2.6 days on average. For nearly one in five businesses, the process takes five or more days.
• Businesses struggle with people, process and politics challenges: Close to half (47%) of business leaders point to a lack of visibility across contract creation and management processes; nearly two in five noted their current process requires time from too many employees to complete; and only 13% noted their current process supports quick negotiation and creation. The lack of insight into where contracts are developed, who is executing them and when they are executed not only creates bottlenecks, but also exposes businesses to new risks.
• Organizations are investing in next-generation CLM technology: Sixty percent of respondents are interested in implementing AI-enabled wizards to guide users to the right contract templates and clauses, 68% are looking to semantic analysis AI to identify issues in contracts and 59% are planning to implement bots for voice or IM user interaction.
• Executives are not confident in their organizations' contracts: On a 10-point scale, from not at all confident (one) to completely confident (ten), the average organization rated themselves as a six -- in terms of being confident that its contracts cover all risks, obligations and opportunities. All leaders, regardless of whether they have implemented CLM or not, expect the technology would benefit their organization by reducing the risk of their contracts.

“Contracts are the glue that binds the business world together – they define who does what, when they do it and how much they do it for,” said Ben Allen, SVP of Corporate Development, Conga. “And yet even in this digital world, we believe the results of the Forrester Consulting study verifies that too many businesses still rely on outdated ad hoc, manual or homegrown systems to manage their organizations’ agreements. Conga is dedicated to helping our clients digitally transform their contracts -- and the processes that surround them -- to achieve commercial excellence.”

The second resource available today is the Conga CLM Maturity Assessment. The maturity of an organization’s CLM strategy explains how effectively their contracts are processed, managed and leveraged. To help organizations measure the maturity of their CLM strategies, Conga introduced the Conga CLM Maturity Assessment, which provides an interactive, online quiz that delivers results in less than two minutes.

To learn more about the study and Forrester’s recommendations for managing contracts, download “Reduce Risk and Improve Your Contract Velocity with a CLM Technology Solution” here.

For more information on Conga, visit conga.com.

Methodology

In December 2019 Forrester conducted an online survey of more than 200 respondents in the US, EMEA, and Asia Pacific to evaluate current approaches to contract lifecycle management. Survey participants included decision makers in finance/accounting, operations, IT, procurement, sales, and legal at businesses with sell-side, buy-side, and/ or source-to-contract contracts. All respondents issued and/or managed contracts as part of their business’ day-to-day operations and all respondents manage, create, or execute contracts.

About Conga

Conga, the leader in digital transformation of commercial operations, empowers businesses to modernize revenue generation and optimize commercial relationships, creating simplified workflows and streamlining processes for better, more efficient customer experiences. Conga’s end-to-end suite digitally transforms the foundational elements of business – documents like quotes, contracts, invoices and the business processes that surround them – for well over 10,000 enterprise and mid-market customers.

Source: Conga