Every contract register we have migrated has had the same defect, and it is
never the one people expect. The clauses are fine. The data is mostly fine. What
is missing is the arithmetic between two dates.
The arithmetic
A contract has an end date and a notice period. The date that matters is
neither of those — it is the notice deadline: the end date minus the notice
period, minus however long your own internal process takes to produce a
decision and a signed letter.
That last term is the one nobody writes down. If your category review needs two
weeks and legal needs one, then a ninety-day notice period gives you
seventy-three days of actual discretion, not ninety. Registers that alert on the
end date give you zero.
What we do about it in the CLM cockpit
The contract register computes the notice deadline on entry and puts it, not the
end date, on the calendar. Three things follow from that:
- The alert fires against the deadline, with a configurable lead time that defaults to the internal process time you set once.
- The deadline calendar exports as
.ics, so it lands in the calendar people actually look at rather than in a tool they open quarterly. - Renewal exposure is a portfolio number. Multiplant Contract Management sums the annual value of everything whose notice deadline falls inside the next two quarters. That number is usually the first time anyone sees the scale of it.
A number worth computing once
Take your register. Sum the annual value of every contract whose notice deadline
has already passed but whose end date has not. That is the spend you have
already committed to for another term without deciding to.
In the registers we have migrated, it has never been zero.