Commercial Value Management: Making Contracts the Commercial Core of Enterprise Value (Part 1)

Contract management can seem like a boring topic in business — corporate attorneys taking far too long to create long documents of “legalese” designed around transferring risk to your trading partner in a deal. Managing these contracts in contract lifecycle management (CLM) is a step in the right direction by cross-functionally managing them throughout various business processes: order-to-cash, source-to-pay, hire-to-retire, record-to-report, etc.

Some organizations will even take contract management a little further and use the nomenclature of commercial management to help shift the focus away from the contractual artifact and more toward commercial business relationships. The focus becomes writing and managing better contracts to incentivize trading partners to more easily comply, collaborate and create a larger pie of value to share.

However, there is a subtle shift happening within the scope of contract and commercial management (CCM), and a not-so-subtle shift that is also happening within the digital realm (e.g., namely artificial intelligence, low-code platforms, open source, “XaaS”). What’s happening is that as contracts get digitized and more deeply modeled, they are becoming the single most important piece of master data within the enterprise that touches virtually every single stakeholder within these core processes and also within corporate functions such as R&D, risk management, strategic planning, treasury, audit, sustainability, digital/innovation and others.

The cornerstone to this transformation (in the private sector at least) is the notion of maximizing value created in commercial activities. Commerce is about exchanging value. Good commerce strives to maximize value for individual parties (i.e., large slice of the pie) and excellent commerce focuses on maximizing value to expand the total economic pie within a value chain. On the sell side, you want to deliver differentiated value to customers in order to retain them and make more money off them over the long term. On the buy side you want to maximize value (i.e., the most “bang for the buck”) by maximizing “bang” (what suppliers commit to deliver to you) and minimize the bucks (spend/costs) flowing out the door. These commitments of expected value to be delivered can take many forms, and using next-generation contract modeling (way beyond tagging and analyzing clause text) and process integration is turning out to be a very practical way to maximize value from the C-suite down to various functional process participants.

In this Spend Matters PRO series, we’ll cover some of the ways in which next-generation contract management (and underlying digital platforms) will model and manage commercial value much more deeply in a way that will support enterprise processes in areas such as GRC (governance, risk and compliance), Treasury, FP&A, IT service management, project/program portfolio management, commodity management, supply chain execution and many other areas.