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In the evolving landscape for Enterprise Contract Management, proactive obligations management is playing a critical role. Tracking the obligations enshrined in contracts is critical to an enterprise’s understanding of whether the business is proceeding as planned and taking proactive steps to correct the course if not.
Non-compliance on obligations not only hurts performance, but also can expose businesses to substantial risks – including reputational damage, financial loss, and soured partner relationships
With this release, the ICI Obligation Management Application has been enhanced to enable companies achieve contractual compliance at an enterprise scale. Built on the ICI platform, the ICI Obligation Management app transforms how organizations identify, create, manage and fulfill obligations that were previously hidden in complex contract language. The app includes OOTB constructs for “Obligations” & “Fulfillments” assisted by powerful rule-based obligation ownership, workflow tools to ensure seamless obligation fulfillment, and sophisticated analytics – all designed to protect your business and maximize the ROI of your relationships. You can configure existing or new ICI Agreements to be able to manage Obligations.
The benefits of the Obligation Management App include the ability to:
The purpose of this document is to:
The user must have:
In ever-changing business scenarios, the relevance of Enterprise Contract Management (ECM) to handle global contracts has grown manifold. Contracts establish a working model for a business to reach a future desired state - It defines the rules of business interaction and how business outcomes will be achieved. However, until business parties live up to the plan, those outcomes are not ensured.
Therefore, tracking obligations enshrined in contracts is critical to an enterprise’s understanding of whether the business is proceeding as planned and taking proactive steps to correct the course.
Non-compliance of obligations not only hurts performance but can also expose businesses to substantial risks – including reputational damage, financial loss, and soured partner relationships.
The ICI Obligation Management application built and designed along with the line of Icertis Contract Intelligence (ICI) platform provides out-of-the-box Obligation and Fulfillment objects and their workflow. Like everything on ICI, the app is highly configurable and extendible to suit customer requirements.
The holistic management of obligations in an enterprise is easier said than done. Manually managing obligations, as well as SLAs and entitlements, enshrined in contract clauses and terms has many challenges, from the sheer number of obligations found in contracts to the complexity of identifying and fulfilling them.
A major impediment to tracking obligation fulfillment is the enterprise-wide nature of obligations themselves. In the real world, one department may create a contract, but the onus to fulfill contractual obligations is usually on another department. This is a common scenario with manufacturers of complex products, like airplanes, automobiles, drugs, etc. The sales team at the airplane manufacturer accommodates an airline’s requirements in the contract to close the deal, but it is up to the sourcing department to buy the goods and services needed to meet those requirements, and maybe the customer services department to fulfill the warranty related commitments. Hence, the typical contract management process leaves obligations siloed within departments, hindering visibility, tracking, and ultimately performance.
Even at organizations where contracts are centrally managed, obligation fulfillment may still be fragmented across the organization. It is estimated that at large organizations, 2% of revenue is lost due to missed obligations. Some key concerns for the CxO or senior leadership include: Are we fulfilling all our obligations? Are we defaulting on any business/regulatory or statutory obligations?
These questions are impossible to answer if obligations are not centrally managed and are not linked to various contracts that the organization has signed.
A McKinsey & Company study estimates leakage due to unfulfilled obligations at 2% in large enterprises. For an enterprise with $2 billion in annual spend, that adds up to $40 million a year. The identification and extraction of obligation is currently a human-vetted process, which is typically driven by the legal team and prone to human errors.
Some of the key challenges faced by companies dealing with contractual obligations are:
A new approach is an obligation centered on contract management. This approach extracts obligations from the ultimate source of truth that contracts are and centralizes them to improve visibility and performance.
The ICI Obligation Management app, built on top of the ICI platform enables companies to execute this vision to drive compliance at enterprise scale, thereby building and protecting brand trust, improving business outcomes and most importantly ensuring that the business is always compliant.
The app provides an integrated environment that identifies and extracts existing obligations, risks, commitments from different ICI signed contracts to make them manageable, trackable, inheritable and contract-centric compliant.
The flexible architecture and configurable design of the platform allow users to configure and run a variety of obligations to their logical fulfillment. Given that the Obligation Management app is built on ICI Platform, implementations can easily configure dashboards and reports to have all-up views on overdue obligations.
The ICI Obligation Management app helps customers address obligation requirements and get even more of their investment in the ICI platform. It offers these powerful capabilities for obligation management contracts:
This section provides a sneak peek into some examples of contractual obligations and how they can be managed on the ICI Obligation Management app. These examples are intended to build a deeper intuition on what contractual obligations/fulfillments are, how obligations and fulfillments differ, and understand these from a lens of real-world contracts.
As you scan through the agreement/clause texts, one can recognize statements which enforce an action and ownership in the form of “X entity shall perform Y” kind of statements. These are typically referred to as the contractual obligations.
Example 1: Non-SLA Obligations
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Example 2: SLA Obligations
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Example 3: Deliverables
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Example 1: Milestones
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Example 4: Weekly SLA reports to track business/delivery performance.
Example 5: Background validation for resources working on the account.
For any typical Customer Offshore Development (ODC) scenario in a IT Services, the company has an obligation to ensure any resources working in this ODC/Customer Account shall go through background verification. This might be an obligation enshrined in the MSA or any of the ongoing SOW Agreements. The following are some of the scenarios:
This is an ongoing obligation until the duration of the customer’s contract. The Obligation owner may choose to fulfill the obligation in a time-based fashion say at monthly frequency
The obligation in this example is on the Company to furnish the Audit reports to the Customer within a stipulated time (10 business days) when asked. This is not a time-based obligation, but will be manually accepted upon the event when the Customer asks for it. The Audit report can be submitted.
The key benefits of using the ICI Obligation Management app include:
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We have some capabilities in the system which allude to the Obligation lifecycle. Here we describe the scope of each of them and clarify the scope entailed.
The obligation management process augments your contract management process by giving you effective tools to discover, identify and manage obligations through to fulfillment. There are various scenarios in which Obligation Management fits into the Contract management process. Some examples of these are:
Example 1: Post Agreement Execution
The focus during this scenario is to ensure that the right set of obligations are discovered (either manually or with Obligation AI discovery) and thereafter managed through the complete lifecycle. In this scenario since the agreement is executed, the obligations are also agreed upon, hence the focus here is to ensure they are tracked through the Contract’s lifetime.
This section describes the typical workflow for Creating, Reviewing, Accepting and Tracking fulfillments. The diagram below depicts the typical functions/user roles performing the respective operations.
Key Points to Note:
The Legal / QC functions typically read through the agreements to manually extract Obligations or use Obligations AI to triage and discover obligations. This role has enough legal knowledge to identify the right obligations that matter for the agreement and the business as a whole. The obligations are created in the Draft state.
The ICI Obligation Management app introduces necessary ICI entities to track and monitor obligations for your Agreements. The app introduces ICIOMAppObligation & ICIOMAppFulfillment entities. These are seeded with required config, workflows, rules, metadata which can be extended as required for your implementation needs. These entities are of type Associated Document Contract Types as referred to in the ICI terminology.
Obligation & Fulfillments are associated docs seeded with the required configuration. It is expected that you configure your existing/new Agreements by setting the association as depicted in the diagram below. In the sections below we highlight the configuration for the Out Of The Box (OOTB) Entities and also recommend a configuration for implementation.
The OM app is using the construct of the “Association of Association”. The obligation is an association to your Agreement. And Fulfillment is an association to the Obligation.
The “ICMOMAppObligation” entity is used to model Obligations. It uses the “Associated Documents Contract Type” and can be used to associate with the required agreements. The following sections will cover the out-of-the-box configuration, functional behavior as well as the recommended configuration for implementation teams.
The Associated Document “ICMOMAppObligation” is seeded to track Obligations. It is expected that you will configure this seeded entity based on your implementation requirements.
The seeded attributes of “ICMOMAppObligation” are listed as per the categories below. Implementation teams can add new attributes for identifying, categorizing and tracking obligations as required. Any attribute marked with a red asterisk * is MANDATORY for creating the Obligation instance.
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The ICI Obligation Management app is modeled on the Association of Association construct.
The following Association hierarchy exists:
It is expected for you to configure your existing Agreements to associate the Obligation Contract Type.
The following screenshot displays the Obligation’s association to Fulfillment which is seeded along with the app:
These are the Masterdata Contract Types seeded with the ICM Obligation Management app, and they are listed in the following per grouping based on their collective purpose and in the hierarchy in which the masters are consumed within each group:
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These will be used by the ICI Obligation Management app for supporting future scenarios related to Location or Multi-party.
The following table shows the Masterdata in the sequence that they are needed to be entered for obligation creation flow to proceed per configuration:
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The ICI Obligation Management App has seeded the following set of rules. The contract type “ICMOMAppObligation” is configured with the following Rules:
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The ICI Obligation Management app has the following seeded notifications. Since the app is built on the ICI platform, implementation teams can configure notifications as required.
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