Contract Lifecycle Management

Fundamentally, the Contract Lifecycle Management expresses the complete life cycle of managing a contract.

The management of a contract is based on the principles in Contract Management.

We have prepared a graph that illustrates the phases in the Contracct Lifecycle Management.

Here is the following review of all the phases shown from the graph on top of the web page.

Phases:

1. Offer
   Contract Management starts e.g with the need of a supply for which offers are obtained from different suppliers.
2. Draft
   A written draft og the contract material is prepared, which is based the aforementioned proposition phase.
3. Negotiation
   The contract materiel is used as a basis for the negotiation of the contract’s conditions, deadlines, deliveries, costs etc.
4. Approval
   Furthermore, the contract must in some cases be approved in accordance with. Internal processes before signing. This could accur in connection with final legal approvals, the position of the company’s DPO’s or similar. The approval phase can often be charactarized by multible delays and in some cases it is experiences that companies fall back into the negotiation phase.
5. Execution
   The conclusion of the contract is settled when all parties sign off on the final version of the contract. The signature can be done both physically and digitally.
6. Obligations
   Ensuring that the contract delivery takes place according to. the agreement and that the economical as well as the temporal parameters are complied with.
7. Compliance
   This is where the on-going follow up of the contract takes place. E.g if the contract deals with a delivery that includes a data processor aggrement, then this must be individually controlled on an ongoing basis.
8. Renewal
   In this phase it is of the upmost importance that companies have automated processes for managing the contract’s renewal, termination and expiration dates. Contracts often have a given renewal date, but the work of preparing for the renewal of the contract must start weeks or months earlier than the actual renewal date.

Depending on contract type, industry and size of delivery, the aforementioned key points are valued differently.