Contracts are the language of business. With easy contract for SAP ® Solutions, you and your employees master the management of your contracts from the inside out. Usable throughout your company and when on the go, the ease of use of the contract management through the SAP Fiori user interfaces allows you to leave the limitations of space and time behind.
SAP enables you to digitalize almost all tasks in your company in an incredibly efficient manner. Nevertheless, company-wide management of contracts has long been a weak point in the SAP system. This certainly boils down to the fact that contract management is generally one of the last areas to be considered when it comes to digitalizing business processes in many companies.
However, this doesn’t have to remain the case. After all, there have long been holistic solutions that make contract management in SAP both efficient and user-friendly. In this blog post, you’ll discover how you can benefit from comprehensive, company-wide digitalization of contract management and what you need to look out for when selecting a suitable solution if you work with SAP in your organization. The best news first: With easy contract for SAP ® Solutions, you can rely on a contract management solution which is based on a single source of truth approach.
Throughout your company and across locations, easy Contract Management therefore ensures a uniform database for contractual matters. Inconsistencies and contradictory versions of contracts and duplicates are therefore avoided right from the start. And easy Contract Management also supports you with your everyday compilation of contracts in SAP ® : Your legal department approves tested text modules for use via the contract library, which you and your teams can use to create contracts in SAP ® with ease. A user interface (SAP Fiori) which is easy to use on standard devices – from smart phones/tablets to desktop PCs – supports you wherever you are.
The perfect example of best-in-class software for holistic contract lifecycle management is easy contract for SAP. The modular add-on not only supports all contract types across your company, adopts the single point of truth approach and functions as a SAP-certified end-to-end solution. It also guides users through the entire CLM workflow with a number of user-friendly features and functions.
Through the customizable dashboards, users only get to see the contracts and matters that fall within their area of responsibility. Missing contract deadlines is a thing of the past with easy contract Management. A sophisticated deadline management system automatically reminds your users of upcoming contract deadlines – and due to the deep integration into the commercial processes, users can access invoices and contracts, etc. directly from the SAP ® Fiori Launchpad.
After login: Contracts, dates and to-do’s at a glanceAs soon as you launch the application, you are greeted by the familiar Fiori Launchpad. Neat and clearly designed, easy contract for SAP Solutions brings you up to speed. Anyplace, anytime. On almost any device. Each Fiori tile provides a content type for managing key business contract issues – from the deadline management, to monitoring key KPIs, to the process journal. The latter allows you to delve into the past of your contractual processes, which means decisions remain traceable in detail even years later.
easy contract for SAP Solutions transforms your contract management into a center for efficiency. You assign contract types, of which there are several, to different contract groups. You can customize these contract groups to fulfill your business needs. This speeds up your daily work immensely. Provide important contract groups to your key users on a clear basis as a Fiori tile in the easy contract Management launchpad. The icing on the cake: When creating a contract, the reference to a SAP object, such as a purchase order or invoice, can be made directly. You can then access these SAP objects directly from the respective contract – simply with a mouse click. Users of contract management in SAP ® can also jump directly from the Fiori Launchpad to the SAP business objects.
When a new contract is created, easy contract Management creates the contract file associated with the contract in SAP ® . Figuratively speaking, this file acts as a digital bracket that brings together all the documents which accompany the contract. This keeps the context intact. This creates structure and gives you an overview. When viewing a contract in easy contract Management, you get jump options to “Basic contract data”, to “Contract partners (debtors, creditors)”, to corresponding emails, to the payment plan, or to the scope of application, etc.
All of the release processes for contract documents can be defined and organized in work flows. For this purpose, easy contract for SAP Solutions uses SAP technology. When setting up and creating work flows, however, a separate interface is used, which makes this much easier. Critical processing actions, such as deleting or moving documents or files, can be linked to multiple visual check work flows. In this way, you remain compliant.
Don’t miss out on any more events on the topic of contracts. easy contract for SAP Solutions automatically reminds you of contracts that can be terminated and fixed-term contracts, the contractual term of which is about to end. easy contract Management also enables individual resubmissions and much more. A standard selection is available for the contract search feature. The user can initialize additional search fields from a field list and create his or her own search views. This means that the results list only shows contracts for which a user has the appropriate authorization.
Successful contract management impresses due to its deep process integration within the SAP contract file. In this way, easy contract for SAP Solutions connects SAP standard modules from the area of controlling, sales, finance, etc. with the contract management. Through this process-related connection, easy contract Management allows for the creation of a context with the cost and posting, transaction, and other contract processes in SAP ® . Direct access to your contracts is therefore possible at any time from various contexts: for example, in the invoice verification process in the event of price variances, in the offer phase, or in the contract negotiation phase – therefore, all contract management in SAP through easy contract Management is a piece of cake.
For many years, SAP and other third-party providers have primarily sought to digitalize the contract management of individual application and business areas, e.g. with a focus on procurement. For instance, SAP modules such as Material Management (MM) or Real Estate Management (RE-FX) still only support contracts that are linked to that respective area.
Although this approach does allow for departmental improvements in contract management, it is not a satisfactory solution for companies seeking to achieve consistent control of contract management throughout their entire organization. From a corporate strategy perspective, a holistic solution for contract management in SAP has four tasks:
To accomplish these tasks, you have to embed a workflow-supported solution for contract management in SAP as deeply as possible into the infrastructure of the existing SAP system across departments – so that your leading ERP system continues to be the single source/point of truth.
Consistent data is one of the most vital foundations for the end-to-end digitization of business processes without media disruptions. To achieve this goal, all data-handling software applications in a company must exchange their data via the same platform. After all, this is the only way to eliminate the possibility of incorrect, redundant or contradictory data being processed within a company and of media disruptions happening when information is exchanged, which in turn are a potential source of error and diminish process efficiency.
To ensure that this basic prerequisite for clean data management is met, all systems in a company should follow the “single source of truth” approach. In other words, all programs working with data should only have one source of truth and exchange their information via an interface with this one central data platform.
This is particularly important in contract management, where numerous master data such as the addresses of business partners, customers and suppliers is stored in the system. If this data is updated in a business process outside of contract management, e.g. because an employee in procurement updated the address of a supplier – this change must be stored consistently in the system so that it can be output correctly when the new supplier contract is automatically created.
Having a single point of truth is a must if you want to enjoy seamless contract management in SAP. However, clean data management alone does not guarantee best-in-class contract lifecycle management in SAP. This is because holistic contract management can be integrated much more deeply in SAP: as a SAP-based and SAP-certified end-to-end solution. We recommend you keep this in mind when selecting potential solutions. SAP certification proves that the technology will integrate seamlessly with SAP solutions, enabling you to have total confidence in your investment.
For users, this means they remain in their familiar SAP environment during contract lifecycle management:
This approach enables a seamless user experience in your organization right from the outset, as the new software is 100% compliant with SAP’s already internalized design and usability specifications: users remain in the familiar SAP universe. This is a major benefit, especially in contract management, because it means very different groups of people across departments can use the software.
