Existing systems for Contract Management fall into two classes - those that load some of the parameters of the contract into an ERP system, to aid in administering the contract, and those that assist in the management of the contract documents.
Neither of these is of much help in "bringing the contract to life" - in evaluating the risks in a single contract or across the portfolio of contracts, in connecting buy and sell contracts together, in contributing to all the tedious administrative jobs that are vital to contract management.
The lawyers who draft contracts operate in a very different world to the production staff who administer the contracts, and making the conversion isn't easy unless there is considerable knowledge about logic, existence, set handling.
Using a system that reads the structure of the contract and turns it into an active piece of knowledge with many uses, Orion brings a new level of capability to Contract Management. Some examples:
Abstraction
The most generic use is to provide abstraction of the contract. Loading the parameters of a contract into an ERP form can be trying, as the legal structure will probably be different to the way the form is set up, lawyers relishing a little flexibility in how they describe things.
Policies
Each contract needs to be read in the context of its attachments, exhibits and company policies. People often short-circuit this process by guessing, with expensive results if there is a mistake. The system reads the contract and its exhibits, but can also read relevant company policies and verify there are no inconsistencies.
Supply Chain Management
The Liquidated Damages clause can hide significant risks to the organisation, and it is not the responsibility of the lawyer to alert the organisation as to what it means. Reading the clause, extracting its structure, and linking that to the supply situation can highlight the effect of the clause - how much might we lose, is it worth accepting the business. The legalese is turned into a graph of the risk, making it much easier for production staff to give useful input.
Property Management
Someone is moving out of Suite 304 - does any of the other tenants have right of first offer? This is a tedious business if a dozen leases have to be read, while checking whether someone has expanded their lease onto that floor. Having their structures on file makes it an easy, automatic process to assemble a set of tenants who have right of offer in the correct sequence.
Management Contract
Managing a valuable physical asset for another company can be difficult, especially if the manager operates other assets which may compete with the managed asset, or spreads costs over all the assets that are managed. Little legal wrinkles are coming up all the time, and the contract manager needs assistance in finding and interpreting these.
Franchise Agreement
Each franchise agreement may have little value, but small differences in the contracts spread over a large number can result in a mangement headache.
SLAs
Service level agreements are just one more form of contract, but they bring in resource allocation as well as part of the agreement. Orion is well suited to handling these aspects as well, making the resulting system much more powerful than if the two components remained separate due to incompatible technology. See Planning and Scheduling.
The system for text extraction shows most value in relatively dynamic applications - supply chain and logistics, mall leases, asset management of a business.
See
Introduction to Orion Technology