FEATURE
Data Mining Your Contracts By ANDREW BANQUER
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f you had to name the one most valuable aspect of a contract, what would that be? Responses to that question vary, but responders typically think about a single contract and its impact on the parties, rather than the contract’s impact on a company’s contracting as a whole. But what if the most important part of a contract is the data it generates? If you aggregate, organize and analyze all the data included in every contract, then you will have critical insights into the overall effectiveness of your contracting process and the way you transact business. From that analysis, you can determine how to be more effective. Contracting analytics is the secret sauce that allows you to make data-informed changes to your operating model and improve those objectives that matter most — whether that’s revenue growth, cost-savings, risk management or longer-lasting relationships with your contracting partners. It can also provide objective justification for organizational or behavioral change.
DATA THAT CAN BE DERIVED A single contract negotiation can provide a rich source of data, including total cycle time from initiation to signature, individual cycle time elements, amount of back and forth between parties, deviations from acceptable
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