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Return to ICI Obligation Management.
Contents
- 1 ICI Obligation Management
- 1.1 Purpose of the Document
- 1.2 The Prerequisites
- 1.3 Overview
- 1.4 The Obligation Management Process
- 1.5 Working with Obligations
- 1.6 Configuring your existing Agreement Contract Type to manage Obligations
- 1.7 Navigating through the Obligation Management App
- 1.8 Creating an Obligation for an Agreement
- 1.9 Inheriting Obligations
- 1.10 Working with Fulfillments
- 1.11 Creating and Editing Fulfillments
- 1.12 Configuring Reports
- 1.13 Creating Obligations using Bulk Actions
- 1.14 Obligation Library
- 1.15 Glossary
- 1.16 Known Issues
ICI Obligation Management[edit]
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:
- Identify the contractual obligations from different ICI signed contracts
- Create fulfillments from the identified contractual obligation
- Review obligations and related fulfillments
- Inherit contractual obligations from one contract to another
- Assign appropriate users assigned to your obligation and fulfillments
- Drive obligation and its related fulfillments to completion and giving you workflow controls (hold, withdraw, and cancel)
- Monitor your obligations and its business impact
Purpose of the Document[edit]
The purpose of this document is to:
- Introduce the ICI Obligation Management App and how it fits into the enterprise contract management workflow.
- Describe the business context and solution framework for ICI Obligation Management App
- Describe how the obligation Management is built on the ICI platform and how to set up and configure for your implementation needs.
- Describe the Config, Workflow for managing the Obligation life cycle.
The Prerequisites[edit]
The user must have:
- Completed ICI Platform Training
- Obligation Management Application must be enabled on the customer environment
Overview[edit]
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 Challenge[edit]
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.
Conventional view of Enterprise Contract Management where obligations are viewed and managed in business silos
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 lack of insight and visibility into contractual obligations
- Failure to discover obligations
- Missing an obligation that can lead to a costly litigation
- Unfulfilling obligations that can strain business relationships and cause reputational damage
- No defined workflow for completion of obligations and commitments
- No clear ownership of responsibilities
- Failure to gauge the implications of missed obligations
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.
An obligation centered view to manage enterprise wide obligations
The Solution Framework[edit]
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 Capabilities[edit]
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:
- Automatic Obligation Discovery
- Automatically discover, extract, and setup obligations from any contract, through the power of artificial intelligence.
- Automatically discover, extract, and setup obligations from any contract, through the power of artificial intelligence.
- Flexible Setup & Creation of Obligations
- Create manual or time-based fulfillments from identified obligations such that the system triggers fulfillments at appropriate times to enforce compliance.
- Automatically create obligations using the Obligation Library.
- Rule-based Obligation Ownership
- Assign obligations to both internal and external users and automatically handle reassignments due to transfers, departures, etc.
- Seamless Obligation Fulfillment
- Generate and manage fulfillment processes using ICI tasks for internal users and for third-party users via the ICI Collaboration Portal or customized integrations. The out of box workflows for Obligations & Fulfillments will help review, approval of workflows to drive compliance.
- Easily control the process workflow by setting obligations on hold, withdraw, and cancel if required.
- Inherited Obligations Across Contracts
- Quickly setup rules to cascade and enforce obligations across related agreements – e.g. from MSAs to SOWs.
- Sophisticated Reporting & Analytics
- Track and monitor overdue fulfillments.
- Measure risk and compliance to deliver rolled-up insights across the enterprise.
- Ability to slice and dice operational data on obligation compliance using Advanced Analytics (PowerBI).
The Examples[edit]
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.
Note: The following examples are masked for customer/end-user references.
Example 1: Non-SLA Obligations
Example 2: SLA Obligations
Example 3: Deliverables
Example 4: Milestones
Example 5: Weekly SLA reports to track business/delivery performance.
Example 6: 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
- 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, (such as monthly frequency).
- The Obligation Owner OR Accountable Person(s) for this obligation is the SOW Owner (typically, Project/Delivery Manager).
- The Fulfillment associated to this agreement would be owned by another function (such as HR). But, the Obligation Owner will certify of the Fulfillment is met or not.
- The Fulfillment’s owners (HR in this example) will upload the Fulfillment Evidence in the form of a file or a zip which is approved by the Obligation Owner.
Example 7: Share Audit reports within XX days of notice.
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 Benefits[edit]
The key benefits of using the ICI Obligation Management app include:
- Significantly reduced risks by complying with all obligations - identify and execute any implicit or explicit promises, duties and accountabilities.
- Reduced costs and contract turnaround time by automating the obligation lifecycle.
- Improved customer and supplier relationships.
- Better outcomes in contract negotiations, renewals and other business decisions.
- Improved customer-supplier relationships with ongoing engagement for managing obligations.
- Advanced recovery of financial compensation for unfulfilled counterparty obligations.
- Inherited obligation from the parent (MSA) to the child (SOW) to enforce compliance.
- Cascaded obligation changes from the parent (MSA) to the child (SOW) to enforce compliance.
- Intelligent management of contract performance with obligation performance tracking KPIs.
ObligationAI, Obligation Management and Commitments[edit]
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.
- Obligation AI (O/AI): As part of the Discover AI feature set, we have an ability to discover obligations from third party or own contracts. This capability helps assist the otherwise human process of manually discovering and extracting obligations from agreements. Once obligations are discovered, customers have the flexibility to integrate with the ICI Obligation Management app or any other third party integrated app.
- Obligation Management (OM): After obligations are discovered, either manually or through O/AI, we use the Obligation Management app capability to setup, track and monitor actual obligations. With dedicated entities called Obligation and Fulfillment, one can easily setup the ownership of obligation, setup the workflow to approve and agree with fulfillment evidence and track overdue fulfillments to have an all-up view of contractual compliance.
- Commitments: This capability is used to plan and perform agreement administration tasks. While some customers have tried using the Commitments capability to manage contractual obligations, there may be some limitations to managing the complete obligation lifecycle. Some of these include:
- Commitments are a light weight task and do not model the Obligation and Fulfillment entities or their workflow to manage the specialized Obligation lifecycle
- Commitments do not have an ability to create time-based fulfillments or capture fulfillment evidence which is core to the obligation management process
- Commitments have limited capability when it comes to configuring ownership, rules, notifications, etc. which are required by implementation teams
Note: It is recommended to use the Obligation Management app instead of Commitments considering these limitations.
The Obligation Management Process[edit]
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.
We can see the post-agreement execution phases for obligation discovery & management. We also call out the typical user roles that are involved in the process.
Example 2: During Agreement Negotiation
The focus during this phase is to use Obligations to assist the Agreement negotiation phase. When the Agreement edits, the Agreement Team would like to analyze the impact of change with respect to the obligations entailed.
This depicts the Obligation discovery & triage along with the agreement negotiate phase
Note: You need to configure ObligationAI such that Obligations are discovered upon every edit/new version of the agreement to be able to see the impact on obligations.
The Obligation Management Workflow[edit]
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.
- Once identified the Agreement Owners, typically the Primary/Secondary Owner on the Team will accept and approve the Obligations. Only after Obligation is approved, the obligations lifecycle begins.
- For approved Obligations, Fulfillment instances are spawned at the configured frequencies. It is also highlighted that the Fulfillments owner is different than the Obligations Owner.
- Fulfillment’s team is responsible for submitting the fulfillment evidence and send it for approval to the Obligation owner.
- If the Fulfillment is not approved before the due date, the fulfillment turns to overdue.
Working with Obligations[edit]
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.
Depicts the new entities introduced for ICI Obligation Management App
Note: After you install the ICI Obligation Management App, you will be required to edit the configuration for the new entities (Obligation & Fulfillment) to suite your implementation requirements. In the following section we call out the recommended configuration (wherever applicable) to help you with Obligation Management implementation.
The Out-of-the-Box Entity[edit]
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.
Note: Only system provided Contract Type can be used for Obligation Management.
Contract Types[edit]
The Associated Document “ICMOMAppObligation” is seeded to track Obligations. It is expected that you will configure this seeded entity based on your implementation requirements.
Note: With the current release, multiple configurations of Obligation/Fulfillments are not allowed. So, you cannot create a new Associated Document Contract Type and identify it for Obligation tracking.
The following table depicts the OM App Contract Types:
Seeded Attributes[edit]
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.
Association[edit]
The ICI Obligation Management app is modeled on the Association of Association construct.
The following Association hierarchy exists:
- Agreement (Existing)
- Associated to → Obligation Association
- Associated to → Fulfillment Association
- Associated to → Obligation Association
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:
For more information about Association, refer to the “ICI Obligation Management Configuration Guide”.
Masterdata[edit]
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:
These will be used by the ICI Obligation Management app for supporting future scenarios related to Location or Multi-party.
Note: Implementation teams will use ICI’s bulk utility to add these new masterdata in bulk, not manually going row by row.
The following table shows the Masterdata in the sequence that they are needed to be entered for obligation creation flow to proceed per configuration:
Rules[edit]
The ICI Obligation Management App has seeded the following set of rules. The contract type “ICMOMAppObligation” is configured with the following Rules:
Notifications[edit]
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.
There is a dedicated Notification Category for the ICI OM App – “Obligation Management Notifications”, and a seeded notification for fulfillment creation has also been added:
- This is a seeded notification to notify fulfillment creations.
- The notification is triggered and sent when a fulfillment gets created.
- These notifications are sent to Fulfillment Owners.
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For more information about seeded attributes, refer to the “ICI Obligation Management Configuration Guide”.
Rules[edit]The ICI Obligation Management app is seeded with the default set of rules. The contract type “ICMOMAppFulfillment” is configured with the following Rules:
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