Concord Unveils Guided Contract Tools to Cut Complexity with Self-Service CLM Automation

After two rounds of investment this year, the contract management firm Concord has added self-service automation tools to it platform to accelerate contract creation and facilitate collaborative contract authoring inside companies, the San Francisco-based software provider announced Tuesday.

Concord says users from any department — like procurement, HR, legal or sales — can now use its prepopulated templates or request a contract initiation through a single, digital platform.

Procurement workers can fill out the templates with fields from outside vendors’ e-procurement systems such as Ariba, Coupa and SAP using Concord’s open API, the company said in a statement. HR managers can use it to draft employment agreements, accelerate hiring and track an employee’s status. For legal departments, Concord says, the automated, prepopulated forms will ease a big administrative burden by providing the needed compliance requirements, correct data and formatting to create contracts up front.

“This is digital transformation at its best,” said Matt Lhoumeau, Concord’s CEO and co-founder, in the statement. “Until now, the Concord platform was typically used by 30% of an organization. By creating automated collaboration tools for the contract inception process, it brings 100% of an organization onto the platform.”

Integrating a digitized process into the contract lifecycle management (CLM) brings efficiency, productivity, compliance and visibility benefits to an organization, Concord said. It also said that its platform eliminates the need for third-party e-signature providers, email and Word.

Pierre Mitchell, chief research officer at Spend Matters, said Concord’s latest product update is taking the CLM provider in the right direction.

“Concord’s push toward self-service ‘guided contracting’ is right on trend with the high-end CLM leaders,” Mitchell said. “However, it’s going to need to add some steak to its sizzle with a proper clause library before it’s going to compete successfully for more sophisticated CLM requirements that we evaluate in our CLM SolutionMap. We expect this functionality from Concord next year and hope to get them ‘on the map’ then.”

This year, Concord has had two rounds of investment: $25 million in October and $10 million in January.

In August, the company said it attained 300% year-on-year revenue growth. Concord reported that 180,000 companies had joined its platform.