Getting more from your contracts on ServiceNow: best practices from the real world

About the session

At ServiceNow Knowledge 2023, Aavenir hosted a live session on getting the full value from contracts on ServiceNow. For anyone who missed it, here is a summary of the pain points we discussed and the five best practices we shared, drawn from customer implementations.

Common contract management pain points

Organizations managing hundreds or thousands of agreements tend to meet the same problems:

• No central access. Without one system for contract information, creation is slow and errors creep in.
• Scale. Processes that work for a few hundred agreements break down at tens of thousands.
• Hard to change business terms. Adding a new term is slow when contracts sit in several systems.
• Non standard templates. Without approval controls and standard templates, business and regulatory risk rises.
• Messy intake. Contract requests arrive in many ways, which leads to confusion and delay.
• Data integrity. Contract data drifts out of step across systems, which affects customer and vendor relationships.

Left alone, these lead to inefficiency, the cost of maintaining legacy systems and higher compliance risk.

Best practice 1: define goals and objectives

Start with what you want contract management to achieve: a single source of truth for contracts and their data, large efficiency gains from automating repeated tasks, lower risk through standard templates and approval workflows, better data integrity through integration, and stronger vendor and customer management through timely, transparent communication.

Best practice 2: focus on user adoption

Engage users early and keep them involved through implementation. Give them the capabilities that make the system worth using: a central repository with good search, connected data and processes, dashboards and notifications, automated lifecycle workflows, standard templates for nondisclosure agreements, statements of work, master service agreements and third party paper, and tracking of obligations, deviations and risk.

Best practices 3 and 4: choose the platform for today and tomorrow

For today, look for flexible approval and review workflows, configurable templates, layouts and attributes, a clear user experience with lifecycle views and repository search, configurable alerts and reminders, and strong data and action access controls.

For the future, look for performance and scale without trading off security, complementary applications that integrate cleanly, administration that is simple to configure and maintain, connected processes, data and insights, and a consistent experience across applications. A platform such as ServiceNow, which many enterprises already run, meets many of these needs. See Aavenir on ServiceNow.

Best practice 5: crawl, walk, run

Moving to a new contract management system is a journey. Start with a focused scope, learn the system, then expand capabilities and contract types step by step. Work with a trusted partner rather than doing it all alone. Read our contract lifecycle management implementation guide and see Contractflow.

About Aavenir

Aavenir is an enterprise contract intelligence platform for procurement, legal, IT, finance, and sales teams. Aavenir AI reads every agreement an enterprise has signed, Aavenir Atlas answers questions across the whole portfolio, and its apps act on contract terms from sourcing to payment, natively on ServiceNow or standalone. About Aavenir.