Pardon the “Star Wars” reference, but I’m excited about the new Han Solo movie. AI is one of the few critical differentiators within the CLM space, and there’s not a hotter CLM pure-play provider than Icertis. Eighteen months ago, we wrote a four-part series about AI in contract management that explained the various value propositions of AI in the CLM space. In the first installment, we mentioned Icertis, but had to add a caveat to the mention. As of Tuesday, however, we’re going to have to finally update that post, as Icertis has added two new AI-powered apps to its offering.
Buying a Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) application can seem daunting. There are so many stakeholders who touch contracts. We can’t imagine any more foundational commercial business application than contract management that affects so many stakeholders. And at the same time, there are so many market choices.
Trust us, we live these every day. We have over 50 functional requirements within our CLM SolutionMap evaluation database, and there are many requirements that are simply table stakes: version control, role-based access, contract renewal alerts, contract templates, and even basic clause libraries are becoming commodity functionality.
However, there are only a handful of decision points in the decision tree to get down to the few providers that will meet your needs.
First, you have to decide whether you need just pure buy-side capabilities or whether you also need sell-side capabilities and support for employee contracts as well (i.e., whether you really need truly enterprise-wide CLM). If you need strong sell-side functionality, then you’ll immediately be able to knock out some buy-side players, even some of the main procurement suite players.
Next, you’ll need to decide on whether to go with a broader suite or a “mini-suite” provider, or whether you only need just core CLM capabilities. A “mini-suite” can take many forms. Some providers combine CLM plus some sourcing functionality, and others combine CLM with supplier management capabilities (and some have even broader risk/compliance functionality). For practitioners that want to look at some custom combinations of providers, we now support custom SolutionMaps that cross multiple areas so that you can create a true custom SolutionMap rather than just our persona-based maps for various solution types. Contact me if you’d like to discuss this.
And there’s always the issue of whether your IT department prefers the solution to run on existing application infrastructure, whether it’s your ERP system or a SharePoint platform. Hopefully these aren’t hard constraints because there’s only so far that you’ll get with a document-centric approach! You can get to a certain level of capability by adding metadata to contract documents, but until you can model the contract data itself, you’re only going to get so far.
Finally, there’s a handful of unique detailed functionality that really separates the various players. Some of these areas will become more commoditized in the next few years, but others are not so easily solved by marching through the “Feature 500” list. Although the rest of this analysis is for Spend Matters PRO level members only, we welcome our Spend Matters Plus practitioner subscribers to contact us and we’ll send you a copy of this full analysis.
As a super-category of spend, purchased services continue to pose challenges that are felt across all industry. Although there’s a well-known playbook (i.e. get your data-act together; benchmark; rationalize suppliers and source better arrangements), what is it about purchased services that continues to confound our best efforts? Among healthcare providers — an industry that is just now learning to take control of its supply chains — it has been exposed as a huge problem.
Earlier this month, LegalSifter added a renowned expert in contract language to its team. Ken Adams, who joined LegalSifter as an advisor, is the author of “A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting,” published by the American Bar Association, and has spent about 30 years in the legal profession. The legal profession is not particularly known for innovation, so what is it going to look like as AI increasingly comes into play? We posed some questions to Adams on the rise of AI and broader trends in contract management, as well as his work at LegalSifter.
Strategic Procurement Technology Suites SolutionMap ratings provide comparative rankings and insight into how each provider scored from a Solution perspective and Customer Value perspective.
Buy-Side Contract Lifecycle Management SolutionMap ratings provide comparative rankings and insight into how each provider scored from a Solution perspective and Customer Value perspective.
Spend Matters released its Q1 2018 SolutionMap, ranking 40 procurement technology providers across nine different solution categories — including an end-to-end view of Source-to-Pay (S2P) providers and their capabilities for the very first time.
This Spend Matters SolutionMap Insider release note provides insight into the Q1 2018 SolutionMap release for Sourcing, Spend and Procurement Analytics, Supplier Relationship Management & Risk, Contract Lifecycle Management, and Strategic Procurement Technologies Suite Solution Maps, reviewing the process we follow and highlighting what has changed since the last release.
Within the individual areas covered in this brief, the following providers have been added to the Q1 2018 release: Agiloft, Aravo, ConnXus, HICX, Opera BIQ, Simfoni and SynerTrade. Additionally, providers such as SAP Ariba have received updated scoring following the submission and demonstration of new capabilities based on production releases of individual modules. (Non-GA capabilities are not considered in SolutionMap scoring.) This SolutionMap Insider release note explores these and additional changes in the Q1 2018 SolutionMap release.
E-signatures and digital signatures are a rapidly growing sub-segment of the procurement and broader enterprise technology market. The numbers are truly off the charts. According to industry research, for example, the segment experienced 48% growth in 2011, and an average of 53% annual growth in 2012 and 2013. But where do e-signatures and digital signatures fit into e-procurement, beyond simply replacing handwritten signatures on the contract paper? This Spend Matters Plus research brief provides examples and use cases where these solutions can play a critical role supporting end-to-end source-to-pay (S2P) and related procurement processes.
Contract lifecycle management is becoming a priority in many procurement organizations for several reasons. First, sourcing activity is increasingly driven by contract renewals on various types of managed services agreements. Second, sourcing results (e.g., savings) only matter when executed against a contract that gets matched against. Third, outside-in supply risks are ever-present and must be monitored, but a lot of risk is buried within historical contracts in the portfolio.
As such, managing contracts intelligently is going to require a lot more than just the ability to draft new contracts efficiently and analyze simple header-level contract metadata. It's going to require the ability to analyze contracts efficiently and effectively (i.e., deeply) to determine if they contain specific clause language, address identified regulations or fall into certain categories based on specific business rules.
This is going to require a whole new class of contract analytics that until now was only offered by a few big players, like Seal Software (the clear leader in the buy-side contract analytics space who we’ve covered for years), Exari (CLM app with demonstrated AI capabilities) and, to a limited extent, Icertis. Due to the value such solutions would provide, however, a new breed of vendors, including Kira Systems, RAVN (iManage), LawGeex, Luminance, LegalRobot, Counselytics and LegalSifter, are rising up to offer this service. They are all focused on broader contract analytics (i.e., not just the buy side) and each offers a unique market focus and approach to the problem.
In this Vendor Snapshot, we’ll focus on LegalSifter and its technical approach to the problem.
