A Global Approach To Contract Lifecycle Management

In global environments, ensuring that all contracts conform to both corporate standards and local requirements is an essential task, but one not easily accomplished. Equally problematic is the difficulty of maintaining management visibility to the key contract data required to effectively comply with internal mandates and governmental regulations while also optimizing revenues and minimizing procurement costs. Implementing multiple instances of conventional contract lifecycle management applications cannot resolve these challenges because no provision is made for synchronization and bi-directional communication of contract metadata between corporate managers and distributed users.

Most global companies have concluded that the best way to address network latency and performance obstacles for enterprise-wide business applications is by replicating software—and associated data—across multiple, globally distributed data centers. But this approach will only work if the applications themselves support such a distributed infrastructure. Unfortunately, when it comes to Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM), until now, this has not been the case. Instead, vendors attempted to meet the challenges of the global environment by simply implementing multiple, isolated instances of the application on separate hardware stacks at multiple data centers.

While certainly a straightforward solution for the vendor, this approach does not address the challenges of a global CLM environment. Isolated instances of applications cannot, for example, enable enterprise controls to be easily disseminated across all sites. Nor do they facilitate enterprise wide visibility so that information from all sites can be rolled up into the consolidated reports that enable tight management control, reduce revenue leakage, and optimize spend.

Selectica recognizes that these are just a few of the significant shortcomings of early CLM software and offers a unique alternative: A solution that is architecturally designed to empower end-users to easily and quickly access any content, analytical tools, and enterprise reports in the language of their choice, with the appropriate currency, and with the time/date formats required. With the Selectica solution, business terms in contracts are stored as structured data which can be displayed in a local user’s language. This structured data is then replicated across all distributed data centers so that enterprise-wide visibility is ensured, even while distribution of corporate controls to all sites is facilitated.