TSG is pleased to announce our contract management solution for Documentum or Alfresco.  Leveraging portions of HPI for Case Management and Active Wizard for Dynamic Form and Workflow, the solution also combines best of breed integration with leading vendors like HotDocs, WorkShare Compare and DocuSign.  This post will discuss the issues as well as how the solution was created.

Contract Management – What are the ECM issues?

From Wikipedia:

Contract management or contract administration is the … process of systematically and efficiently managing contract creation, execution, and analysis for the purpose of maximizing financial and operational performance and minimizing risk.

Areas of contract management include:

• Authoring and negotiation
• Baseline management
• Commitment management
• Communication management.
• Contract visibility and awareness
• Document management
• Growth (for Sales-side contracts)

Document Management plays a huge role in contract management.  From our client experience, clients like to be able to:

• Drive consistent creation of contracts with data. Data could come from a variety of systems (ex: Salesforce).  Data should be stored and versioned in the Document Management repository to initially start the contract creation process.
• Interview/Intelligent Form – Creation of the eventual contract is driven by data but could also be driven by an intelligent form to ask for additional data or supporting documents surrounding the creation of a contract. The intelligent form can also be used to gather information about workflow review and approval.
• Document Generation – Data can be used to drive substitutions in the document as well as drive inclusion of clauses and terms.
• Workflow Review and Approval – can include annotations as well as electronic signatures.
• External Review, Redline and Approval – to support the back and forth negoitation process.  Process can include managing versions of documents, redline comparisons and eventual third-party approval.
• Reporting – ability to support search/retrieval of contracts as well as monitoring where contracts are within the process.

TSG Contract Management Solution

The contract management solution is presented below:

Components include:

• TSG Active Wizard – dynamic intelligent form for data capture and dynamic workflow.  Also provides internal electronic signatures.
• TSG HPI – Overall case and document management
• HotDocs – Integrated with Active Wizard to provide Document/Contract generation
• WorkShare Compare – Document Comparison – Supporting the back and forth redline process, giving the users detailed knowledge of differences between document versions
• DocuSign – External Electronic Signatures

Look for more announcements as we formalize this solution.  Let us know your thoughts below.