Skillful contract negotiation and management are vital to realizing a company's spend management and supplier performance goals. The essence of good contract management is reasonably straightforward:

• Can you negotiate a good deal?

• Can you capture and document the agreement quickly, flexibly, and accurately, with a minimum of effort, error and exposure?

• Can you monitor compliance to make sure that you are taking advantage of those hard-won gains?

For too many organizations, the answer is "no" to all of these questions. Too many firms still have untrained buyers and/or an undisciplined approach, paper contracts, manual processes and fragmented systems. These problems make authoring contracts very time-consuming and error-prone, and compliance monitoring almost nonexistent. Firms that have made investments in buyer education and improving the full lifecycle of contract processes have realized benefits.

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