Edison, NJ May 8, 2003 Contract management specialist I-many this week released what it said is the first compliance solution to validate financial and operational transactions and compare business partner performance against the terms and conditions of a contract.
With the average global 2000 organization dealing with more than 20,000 contracts enterprisewide, and with contracts covering hundreds of terms and conditions that must be met and monitored, I-many said its Compliance Manager solution automates the monitoring and management of these hundreds of thousands of terms and conditions and validates that each term and condition has been met before payment is received from, or made to, a trading partner.
The goal is to ensure that companies receive the maximum amount of revenues they initially contracted for and that they maximize all of the expense-related incentives due to them, which I-many says can result in tens of millions of dollars of savings.
I-many said its Compliance Manager solution analyzes products or services bought and sold, quantities, prices (including all elements that impact price), dates, quality and tolerances, delivery accuracy and other definable, measurable terms outlined in a contract. The solution also monitors transactions flowing through other enterprise resource planning (ERP) and back-office systems and provides real-time notification of a non-compliant contract, according to the solution provider. The workflow capabilities within Compliance Manager can then be used to resolve non-compliant transactions with trading partners.
"Matching the intent of the contract when the parties signed on the bottom-line and the actual outcome when products and services are delivered lies at the heart of a good business relationship," said Terry Nicholson, chief operating officer at I-many. "I-many Compliance Manager maximizes contract revenues, minimizes contract expenses, heads off contract problems before they impact trade relationships and leverages a company's investments in ERP and other systems. A compliance solution is the only practical way to ensure that customers' products and services deliveries line up one-to-one."
According to the solution provider, the software covers the following type of compliance:
- Policy Compliance, ensuring that business is conducted in accordance with the contracts that are in place within the organization. This is intended to reduce regulatory exposure to contract inaccuracies and associated penalties, and to ensure enterprise compliance with corporate governance policies.
- Transaction Compliance, to detect and resolve non-compliant business transactions that are governed by contracts. It also monitors and analyzes actionable conditions specified in a contract, such as products or services bought and sold, quantities, pricing, payment terms or other custom key performance indicator. This is designed to reduce time and costs associated with compliance activities.
- Process Compliance, which validates whether the contracting process is appropriately feeding the correct information to transactional systems.
The solution connects to ERP, supply chain management, customer relationship management and other transactional systems with customized predefined rules based on mission critical parameters. It detects non-compliant elements, such as contract validation, pricing, shipping methods and payment terms, and then the solution notifies key parties immediately, by various methods including e-mail, numeric or alphanumeric pager to enable on-the-spot corrective action.
The solution allows users to resolve non-compliance collaboratively across the enterprise and with partners, and it provides escalation and close-loop control, as well as compliance analysis and metrics, according to I-many.
For more information on the potential return on investment in contract automation, see the February 13, 2003, iSourceonline article "The Quick Payback from Contract Automation."
For more information on contract management automation, see the article "Digging Out from the Contract Clutter" in the January 2002 issue of iSource Business.
