5 Keys to Building a Modern Agreement Process for Procurement

Despite mounting pressure to move faster, cut costs, maintain compliance, and deliver value across complex supplier relationships, many procurement teams still rely on outdated contract processes. 

These legacy agreement processes often include a random mix of tasks spread across different technologies. A few steps might be tracked in a shared spreadsheet, some are buried in email inboxes, and others may be stored on an employee’s computer. This can lead to several challenges: 

• Rogue contracting: When untrained business line staff choose their own suppliers, it often results in increased risk and higher costs. 

• Missed savings opportunities: Manual tracking can result in overlooked contract renewals, pricing discrepancies, and the loss of bulk discounts. 

• Maintaining compliance: Organizations could face severe penalties or sanctions for non-compliance if employees miss steps when they manually review and redline agreements.

• Evolving expectations: Stakeholders want easy digital access to key agreement details, whether they're negotiating contracts or monitoring performance metrics.

Here's how procurement teams can use Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) to solve these challenges: 

1. Use automation to eliminate human error, but keep the personal touch

A technology upgrade should replace redundant, manual steps in the procurement workflow, like prepopulating information fields or advancing an agreement to the next stage of a workflow. AI-driven insights allow procurement teams to quickly identify areas for additional savings, like better payment terms and automatic renewal clauses. Modern solutions handle those tasks and free up employees to manage strategic responsibilities that call for a human touch, like sourcing new suppliers, negotiating terms, and managing relationships.

Docusign AI-Assisted Review is an add-in for Microsoft Word that helps procurement teams accelerate agreements and complete purchase orders more quickly. It automates the review of agreements against the companyʼs playbooks for faster turnaround times and shorter procurement cycles.

2. Provide enhanced audit trail visibility

How many times throughout the agreement lifecycle does someone reach out to the procurement team for a status update? How often does an agreement get stuck in the signing process because stakeholders aren’t sure of the correct signing order? With the visibility provided by a centralized agreement platform, everyone involved can track the status of their contracts.

The Docusign IAM platform is a centralized, collaborative agreement solution that empowers procurement professionals to streamline the intake, negotiation, and approval of vendor agreements, purchase orders, and master service agreements, which can lead to faster vendor onboarding and improved compliance.

When no one has to ask what happens next, the process moves faster and the procurement team avoids requests for status updates that interrupt their workflow. Admins control visibility, and mobile functionality allows stakeholders to redline, sign, or complete other necessary actions from almost anywhere at any time. Automatic alerts notify stakeholders the moment something important happens with a document.

3. Use a centralized, intelligent repository

A modern agreement workflow can improve procurement performance only if people use it. A centralized, intelligent repository is essential for optimizing the invoicing process, managing supplier agreements, and organizing related records.

Procurement teams can access all purchasing-related agreements in one location, making it easy to search for key terms, clauses, and payment schedules across thousands of documents at once. With less time spent manually searching through documents or chasing down missing information, procurement teams can move quickly and ensure that payments are processed accurately and on time. 

Docusign Navigator helps procurement teams centrally store, manage, and analyze agreements with help from AI—driving efficiencies, uncovering opportunities to lower costs, and reducing risk.

4. Integrate tools for an automated, end-to-end agreement journey

The purpose of an integrated platform is to fully connect each step of the agreement process, reducing duplicate work such as data re-entry while improving accuracy. 

With its 1,000+ integrations with leading ERP and SCM solutions, Docusign simplifies purchasing, automatically transferring data among integrated systems, enabling predefined routing, and automating approval workflows so that purchases happen with the speed businesses require.

5. Simplify regulatory compliance with smarter workflows

Evolving regulations, such as those governing data privacy, environmental protection, and trade compliance, are a reminder that the legal landscape is always in flux. Procurement teams must ensure that all areas of an organization—including the entire supply chain—comply with new regulations. The easiest way to meet compliance standards is to utilize a platform that allows all stakeholders to interact with full transparency.

Docusign offers simple tools, including templates, clause libraries, and other safeguards, to facilitate interactions and help ensure that approvals, signatures, and other actions happen in the optimal order during an agreement.

Procurement success starts with Docusign

The Docusign IAM platform empowers procurement teams to reduce costs, mitigate compliance risk, and increase visibility into the full contract management lifecycle. The platform centralizes contract management across the source-to-pay process. As the leader in modern agreement technology, Docusign helps teams embed those benefits directly inside of the ERPs that organizations such as SAP, Oracle, and others already use.

With Docusign, whether they’re sourcing suppliers, negotiating terms, or distributing payments, procurement teams can manage every aspect of complex agreements from a single centralized repository, with analytics at every step.

Procurement professionals can use Docusign to gain better control of contracts and develop insights for supplier management across their entire organization. The result is faster, simpler, and cheaper agreements, with a better experience for everyone involved in the process. For a more in-depth look at how the IAM platform can help your procurement team, download the “Building a Modern Agreement Workflow for Procurement” eBook.