Independent Study: Three Out of Four Businesses Must Fundamentally Adapt Core Processes to Keep up With the Demands of Modern Contracts

Conga unveils new insights to help organisations measure and understand the maturity of their contract management strategies

Conga, the leader in digital transformation for commercial operations, today announced new tools and resources from Forrester Consulting to help organisations more effectively create and manage contracts to successfully navigate the risks, obligations and opportunities facing their businesses.

The typical business creates, manages and executes more than 1,100 contracts every year – 78 percent of which are customised. To understand more about how businesses manage the volume and velocity of their contracts, Conga commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate organisations’ contract lifecycle management (CLM) approaches, challenges and future plans.

Key findings of the Forrester Consulting study, “Reduce risk and improve your contract velocity with a CLM technology solution,” include:

• Contracts take more than half a workweek to create and execute: While respondents believe it should take 1.2 days to execute a contract, the study found that businesses spend 2.6 days on average. For nearly one in five businesses, the process takes five or more days
• Businesses struggle with people, process and politics challenges: Close to half (47 percent) of business leaders point to a lack of visibility across contract creation and management processes; nearly two in five noted their current process requires time from too many employees to complete; and only 13 percent noted their current process supports quick negotiation and creation. The lack of insight into where contracts are developed, who is executing them and when they are executed not only creates bottlenecks, but also exposes businesses to new risks
• Organisations are investing in next-generation CLM technology:Sixty percent of respondents are interested in implementing AI-enabled wizards to guide users to the right contract templates and clauses, 68 percent are looking to semantic analysis AI to identify issues in contracts and 59 percent are planning to implement bots for voice or IM user interaction
• Executives are not confident in their organisations’ contracts:On a 10-point scale, from not at all confident (one) to completely confident (ten), the average organisation rated themselves as a six – in terms of being confident that its contracts cover all risks, obligations and opportunities. All leaders, regardless of whether they have implemented CLM or not, expect the technology would benefit their organisation by reducing the risk of their contracts

“Contracts are the glue that binds the business world together – they define who does what, when they do it and how much they do it for,” said Ben Allen, SVP of corporate development, Conga. “And yet even in this digital world, we believe the results of the Forrester Consulting study verifies that too many businesses still rely on outdated ad hoc, manual or homegrown systems to manage their organisations’ agreements. Conga is dedicated to helping our clients digitally transform their contracts – and the processes that surround them – to achieve commercial excellence.”

The second resource available today is the Conga CLM Maturity Assessment. The maturity of an organisation’s CLM strategy explains how effectively their contracts are processed, managed and leveraged. To help organisations measure the maturity of their CLM strategies, Conga introduced the Conga CLM Maturity Assessment, which provides an interactive, online quiz that delivers results in less than two minutes.