ESG Audit Questionnaire for Sustainable Procurement

ESG Audit Questionnaire

ESG compliant sourcing and procurement starts with ESG Audit. The very first step toward effective and sustainable procurement begins with selecting the right suppliers. In a sourcing event, as a buyer organization, it is imperative (or rather highly advisable) for you to ensure that your suppliers—as well as their suppliers—have the proper processes in place to prove that their business practices are environmentally friendly, maximize positive social impact, and navigate practical governance practices. Along with all other vendor risk and compliance assessments, you can reduce the complexity of your supply chain by centrally managing ESG assessments.

Download this ESG Audit Questionnaire (ESG Compliance Worksheet) to use it as a guideline for environmentally friendly, socially acceptable, and ethically righteous supply chain activities, especially in the procurement, sourcing, and supplier relationship management-related actions.

Vendor Risk Assessment Checklist

When an organization works with third-party vendors, it is left vulnerable to various risks such as security breaches, business interruption, reputational damage caused by vendors’ non-compliance with regulation and industry standards, and more.

Organizations should conduct a vendor risk assessment periodically to identify and evaluate the risks and hazards of working with a third-party vendor to prevent those from happening.

Vendor risk assessment comprises multiple steps starting from identifying the right vendors for your organization, evaluating vendor contracts, performing on-site audits, assessing their readiness through questionnaires, and so on.

To know more, access this checklist by completing the form and clicking “Download Now.”

Vendor Onboarding Best Practices and Failures Worksheet

A well-designed vendor onboarding process can help avoid expensive mistakes, including those that may put your organization at legal or compliance risk. Mistakes in vendor onboarding are typically failures related to accountability, planning, training, compliance, and follow-through. Sticking to the best practices and avoiding the following common pitfalls create substantial benefits for your company.

Shifting procurement and vendor relationships from an accounts payable function to a more strategic position in your organization creates benefits, including greater competitiveness, improved efficiency, lowered risk, stronger relationships, and a more powerful brand.

Download this ready-to-use editable vendor onboarding worksheet for some final tips before ensuring a successful vendor onboarding process. Vendor onboarding doesn’t have to be a tedious exercise. With smart planning and categorization, you'll streamline future transactions, minimize risk, and build strong vendor relationships.

Vendor Onboarding Software Features Checklist

Vendor lifecycle management, from supplier screening, onboarding to offboarding, is one of the most time-consuming processes involved in procurement. Strategic supplier management and onboarding rely on effective supplier onboarding processes. Make vendor onboarding super-easy and completely connected with the suitable vendor onboarding software that is rich in features and easy to adapt across teams and hierarchies. Your vendor onboarding solution should help you successfully onboard your suppliers through a simple, quick and effective process. When it comes to collaborating with suppliers, you want to ensure that your solution is accessible for both parties. When investing in a supplier onboarding solution, what are the other essential features to look for?

To know more, access this checklist by completing the form and clicking “Download Now.”

CLM Evaluation Checklist

90% of legal teams admit they can’t keep pace with their contracts, as per one of the surveys of WorldCC. Managing contracts efficiently is critical to success, yet proving the value of a CLM solution can be challenging for in-house or legal operations.

A perfect CLM solution ensures faster contract creation, improved internal as well as external collaboration, unlocked contract insights and analytics, and ease of use and implementation.

Are you on the verge of investing in the right CLM solution for your contract management needs? You should consider the CLM evaluation checklist designed by our experts during your CLM evaluation process. These should be top of mind while issuing a formal RFP or inviting vendors to present their solutions directly.

Access this checklist by completing the form and clicking “Download Now.”

Contract Automation for Higher Education

Contract Automation for Higher Education - Should we embrace it or sideline it?

As colleges and universities deal with the reality of growing numbers of online classes and smaller campuses, contract management efficiency for higher education is critical. How should we embrace contract automation in higher education?

The current contract management processes in the higher education industry are riddled with repetitive manual tasks, resulting in delays and errors, leading to compliance and opportunity costs. Over the past decade, the volume and complexity of contracts in the higher education sector have increased dramatically, making it difficult to track and manage the contracts effectively. The problem compounds as due dates come and go, with the risk of penalties and fines for late payments, that may ultimately cause a cascading effect to create a less than ideal experience for your students leading them to opt for other institutions.

How can Higher Education Organizations reduce the gaps in the current contracting processes in order to better manage relationships with suppliers, vendors, partners, and students? How can the education sector optimize procurement efficiency, enhance visibility, and improve regulatory compliance? All these questions have one simple answer – a robust AI-powered contract management solution.

This eBook explains how an intelligent contract management system can instantly identify attributes across a variety of contracts—reducing processes that previously took a couple of hours at least, if not days, to down to just minutes.

An American Research University Connected Contract Management with Sourcing and Procurement Operations on ServiceNow

About Company

The strategic sourcing team at a well-known American Research University collaborates with 3000+ vendors using integrated systems for contract management. The contract administration team manages 5000-6000 active product and services contracts for the Lab research, IT, Admin/facilities, and other categories.

The Research University uses SAP for managing vendors, product catalogs, and a shopping cart for products and services procurement. Recently, they have launched the Procurement Service Portal built on ServiceNow to offer a single integrated point of contact to the Procurement team. The portal supports inquiries and requests only regarding SAP shopping carts, SAP purchase orders, PO-related invoices, or general inquiries. All matters regarding contracts, sourcing, travel, P-Card, non-PO invoices, etc. were handled through traditional channels. The Research University wanted to incorporate these matters into ServiceNow.

Contract Management Challenges

Typically, it was taking multiple emails back and forth between procurement, contract management, risk assessment, and all other stakeholders regarding contract requests, reviews, approvals, and signatures that slowed down contract turnaround time. As a result, many ad hoc purchase requisitions happened with no vendor contract in place.

Additionally, all contract requests and approvals were tracked manually or in spreadsheets and ad-hoc tools. Thus, the Research University had no real-time visibility on the status of contracts.

"With 5000-6000+ active contracts, it was easy to lose track of contract status, and frustrating for procurement teams, who were raring to go ahead with the agreement. The University needed an easy to use solution that can centralize contract management and integrates well with existing systems and procurement services portal on ServiceNow.

Aavenir met all our requirements and AI capabilities were true blessings. Moreover, automated reminders and notiﬁcations during each stage greatly reduces the contract turnaround time.”

-Director of Procurement Operations

The Solution: Aavenir Contract Lifecycle Management for Higher Education

A ServiceNow Champion at the University discovered Aavenir Contractflow, a certified CLM solution on ServiceNow. Aavenir’s clear domain expertise and solution features are nicely aligned with the University's overall Source-to-Pay strategy. Hence, despite Covid situation causing delays in budget allocation, the University implemented Contractﬂow on their existing ServiceNow, and here is what they achieved:

Centralized contract processing on ServiceNow

Using Contractﬂow, the University can handle 30+ different types of contracts (e.g. Master Agreements, NDAs, supplier contracts, research contracts, IT MSA, etc.). Within a few days, they could set up a clause library and 20-50 contract templates to enable self-service contracting on ServiceNow.

Artiﬁcial intelligence for 3rd party contracts

The University was pretty excited about the AI capabilities of Contractﬂow to automatically capture useful metadata from 3rd party contracts. The smart suggestion feature enhances self-service contracting and ensures that contract language complies with university policies and procedures, as well as applicable federal and state laws.

Frictionless contract approval workﬂow

Aavenir’s easy-to-use workﬂow interface enhanced collaboration between internal stakeholders and vendors while creating, reviewing, negotiating, and signing contracts. A rule-based customizable workﬂow orchestration and Microsoft-word-based redlining helped the University to minimize time spent in emails and managing contract versions.

Contract Analytics

Using dashboards and reports, the University can track deliverables, monitor KPIs of contract processes, identify contracts in approval or sent for signing. It takes seconds to access contract information using the google-like search or ﬁlter contracts by type.

Key Results

The American Research University and Aavenir teams went through a series of sessions for successful implementation and adoption. And, it wasn’t long before they saw the beneﬁts of using Aavenir Contractﬂow.

Uniﬁed source-to-contract experience: Extended ServiceNow capabilities to centralize sourcing requests and contract lifecycle. This also increased ROI by leveraging existing subject matter experts, IT support, security, and other KPI’s from a ServiceNow perspective.

Better control of purchasing processes: The University is expecting signiﬁcant reduction, possibly eliminating hundreds of rogue purchases per year, ensuring contracts are in place, reducing exposure to risks, and providing better negotiating power.

Faster Contract Turnaround: Before Aavenir it would take weeks to internally review and negotiate contracts before both parties become comfortable to sign. With Aavenir, it has been reduced to under 10 days with fewer emails back and forth.