Contract Lifecycle Support

Contiki ECM Suite ensures the organization’s control over its contract portfolio and commitments. Contiki ECM processes and documents the contract process from the time the contract is entered into until its completion

The organization gets an efficient and automated process that satisfies legal requirements such as those made by the Norwegian Public Procurement Act and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Significant savings are also achieved through procurement coordination and just-in-time contract follow-up.

Contract creation

A wizard function in Contiki takes the user through all the steps of making a contract and provides assistance in selecting the appropriate templates or clauses and placing them in the relevant folder.
When a contract is being processed, the system proposes a choice of relevant templates from among those based on the product selected and/or the service group for the particular service. This means that the system will propose templates based on attributes such as contract type and type of acquisition.

Contract approval

The Contiki ECM Suite is totally based on workflows designed to fit the client’s best practices. The process library contains both simple and enhanced approval workflows and routing functions. Simple routing workflows can be designed “on the fly” by each individual user.
These workflows make collaboration between individuals and departments easy, and are the ideal tool for involving non-contract specialists in contract management processes. Typical application areas for approval workflows are.

Workflows automating business processes

Contiki is a workflow-based system with extensive flexibility to model the workflows as required within large corporations. At each step in the process it is possible to set a number of criteria reflecting business rules in the corporation. Individuals who have specific roles will be given access to the processes relevant to them.

Contract repository & document management

Contiki will intelligently generate and assemble documents by means of a wizard-based user-interface that guides users through the processes of putting together templates and typical contracts.

User interface

Like an increasing number of modern software packages, Contiki has a dual user interface consisting of a web user interface and a windows user interface. The philosophy has been to take full advantage of available technology by selecting the interface that is best suited to the purpose of each of the supported functionalities in the system. The important issue here is accessibility – worldwide. By design, the Contiki application is always accessible via hyper text transfer protocol (http) so that use of Windows or WEB is predominantly an issue of user interface.

Contiki Collaboration Server, the contract portal

The web-based user interface is easy to learn and does not require in-depth training since all it requires is that the user follow hyperlinks.
Information sharing: Contiki allows the purchasing/contract department to update their own WEB pages for distribution on an intranet. Typical information includes procedures and procurement policies, general information and advice, news, most recent purchases/contracts and staff benefits.

Risk management & compliance

After the Enron and WorldCom disasters, there is a rapidly growing awareness that contracts are the best source for information regarding future revenues, future costs and risks regarding both. Therefore, structured routines with regards to the management of a company’s contracts are an important part of any compliance rules and regulations currently being implemented worldwide.
What distinguishes Contiki from other systems is that the contract documentation comes as a natural consequence of the workflows supported by the system.

Reporting and analytics

Extensive search and reporting facilities are available in Contiki. You can search for:

Contracts
Documents
Text within any document/all documents
Text within memos
Clauses
Combinations of the above Read more

Link with other business processes

The BPEL4WS compatible workflow core of Contiki and the web-service-based ECM functionality enables a new level of integration between enterprise applications. The practical consequence of this is that any function in any web-service-based enterprise application (ERP, SRM, Document Management) can be used at any stage of a Contiki Workflow. Likewise, any Contiki function can be used at any stage in a workflow in other BPEL compatible applications.

Reminders and notifications

Users can define reminders for any event they please. The Contiki suite contains very powerful support to generate reminders/notifications to Contiki users, others in the organization and the organization’s customers and suppliers.
Default reminders are set up while setting the system parameters. This means that for each event, the default reminder period and default message will be defined. These can be overruled and the user can define who will receive the reminder and how they will receive it: internally within Contiki, via ordinary e-mails or both.