contract management

Online Contract Management for Retail

Posted on | by docxpresso

One of the most common use scenarios for Docxpresso is Contract Management.

Thanks to the Docxpresso flexibility and extensible capabilities it may be used to cater for the needs of individuals, SMEs or huge multinational corporations regardless of their size or specific needs.

We have just finished a quite big project which goal is to move towards a “fully digital management” of all the contracts of one of the biggest retailers in Spain (with revenues well over 7 billion euros).

At the beginning of the 4th Quarter of 2017 we were contacted by the legal department of this corporation to study the possibility to develop a fully paperless workflow for the generation of contracts with providers and distributors with the help of Docxpresso.

Contract Templates Online

In a matter of days and taking advantage of their complete repository of “contract templates” (that were already both in Word and Excel formats) we were able to build a “mock platform” that allowed to manage quite a few of these contracts in their private cloud in a fully paperless fashion, integrating data from their databases and interacting bidirectionally with some of their internal Web Services.

After this preliminary proof of concept they showed very satisfied and a proposal was presented and readily approved. The main goals of the project may be resumed in the following points:

  1. Conversion of all of their contracts (more than two hundred types) into Docxpresso templates for their management online via a browser (core Docxpresso functionality).
  2. User authentication via the company Active Directory and their Authentication Web Service (that takes care of user profiles and permissions for the different internal applications).
  3. Connection to the Corporate databases to recover existing data about products, providers, distributors, logistic centers, etcetera.
  4. Generation and integration within Docxpresso of all the validation and approval workflows for the different families of contracts (some contracts involve the management of more than 30 different document templates as well as external attachments).
  5. Integration of business logic into the contracts in order to avoid faulty generated documents that should be rejected because of inconsistencies.
  6. Integration with their own eIDAS compliant eSignature platform (although at the very beginning they considered to use the eSignature tools integrated within Docxpresso finally they opted to continue with their existing tool that is already integrated in another projects)
  7. Creation of a reporting tool that allows to get a bird’s eye view of the general use of the contract management processes/flows involved.

Create, edit, share contract templates online

In a total time of less than five months our client moved from a fully manual workflow of hundreds of documents exchanged by email or printed in paper, that usually involved an endless back and forth exchange of calls and notifications, to a fully digital solution.

They may now:

  • easily know who did what and when.
  • have 24/7 access to the whole repository of signed contracts with strict and hierarchical permission protocols.
  • make sure that the templates used conform to the requisites of the legal department.
  • generate all contracts much faster and with fewer errors.
  • Handle all processes in a much more ergonomical environment.

Or in a few words: save quite a lot of time and money while working in a more ecological and sustainable fashion.