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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
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
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:
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.
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:
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:
The ICI Obligation Management App has seeded the following set of rules. The contract type “ICMOMAppObligation” is configured with the following Rules:
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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The seeded configuration for “Default Column Search” introduces new default columns to provide a better summary view of obligations on the index page. When a user searches for “Obligations”, the list of obligations displayed includes columns configured in the “Default Column Search” and, thereby, also provides a detailed insight into each obligation:
You can use existing agreements or configure new agreements to manage obligations with the ICI Obligation Management app. Let us now consider an example for configuring the existing agreement contract type.
To edit the existing Agreement Contract Type to manage obligations:
1. Click the “Configure" tile or menu on the top, and select the “Contract Types” option. The Contract Types index page opens.
There is a dedicated Obligation Management navigation tile, which acts as the quintessential entry point to triage and monitor all obligations and fulfillments, and track obligation compliance, with the help of the following options:
This is the obligation dashboard displaying a comprehensive report view of obligations and fulfillments across various analytics. To go to the Dashboard:
1. Click the “Obligations” navigation tile or menu on the top.
This opens up the list view of Obligations per the predefined saved search displaying all the existing obligations in the app.
To go to “All Obligations”:
1. Click the “Obligations” navigation tile or menu on the top.
This opens up the list view of Fulfillments per the predefined saved search displaying all the existing fulfillments in the app.
To go to “All Fulfillments”:
1. Click “Obligation Management” tile.
These are the user-specific fulfillments that a user is directly involved in or assigned with as part of their tasks, being a member of the team/s with specific role/s. The Fulfillment Owner or Fulfillment Approver, who is part of the team for a fulfillment record, will see their respective list of fulfillments, per their role, through this tile option.
To navigate through “My Fulfillments”:
1. Click the “Obligations” navigation tile or menu on the top.
To create an agreement with an obligation:
1. Click the "Agreements" tile on the Dashboard. The "Agreements” index page opens.
The “Create Agreement” page opens.
2. Select the Contract Type Name. For example, OM Basic Agreement.
3. Select "Own" in the Type Of Paper drop-down.
4. Click "Next". The Attributes page opens.
5. Enter the details in the remaining tabs till the Verify page.
6. Click "Create and Publish".
The Obligation created is displayed as shown in the screenshot below:
To create a Time-Based Fulfillment:
1. Click the “Add” icon to create an obligation. The Create Association page opens.
2. Enter the “Name” for the obligation.
3. Enter the “Obligation Details” and Description.
4. Select “Obligation Type” from the drop-down.
5. Select “Obligation Sub-Type” from the drop-down.
6. Select the owning party from the “Party” drop-down.
7. Select the Business Unit from the “Business Unit” drop-down. Based on the Busines Unit selected, the following fields get filled out as per seeded masterdata values per the seeded masters - Functional Team, User Role, Fulfillment Owner(s) and Fulfillment Approver(s).
8. Set the “Additional Users for Fulfillment” as “Yes” or “No”. If its “Yes”:
a. Fill out “Additional Fulfillment Owner”
b. Fill out “Additional Fulfillment Approver”
9. Select “KPI Category” from dropdown.
10. Select “Metric” from dropdown.
11. Fill other relevant KPI fields.
12. Select “Impact due to Non-Fulfillment” as “Low”, “Medium” or “High”.
13. Select “Financial Impact due to Non-Fulfillment” as “Yes” or “No”. If “Yes” is selected:
a. Enter “Quantitative Assessment of Impact”.
14. Select the “Frequency Type” from the drop-down. For example, “Time-Based”.
15. Select the fulfillment frequency in the Frequency drop-down, for example, “Weekly”.
16. Select a date in the “1st Fulfillment’s Due Date” field.
17. Select a date in the “End date” field. This date indicates the end date for fulfillment.
18. Set the “Allow Inheritance” field to “Yes”. This allows the inheritance of approved obligations from the parent agreement to the child agreement. For example, MSA_OM to SOW_OM.
19. Set the “Allow Fulfillment Tracking” field to “Yes”. This allows the system to track fulfillment instances.
20. Select a file in the “File Path” field.
The obligation is now created with a Weekly fulfillment.
Follow the steps from 1 to 13 mentioned in the section Creating an Obligation with Time-Based Fulfillment and then do the following:
1. Select “Manual” in the “Frequency Type” drop-down.
2. Select a date in the “End date” field.
3. Set the “Allow Inheritance” field to “Yes”.
4. Set the “Allow Fulfillment Tracking” field to “Yes”.
5. Select a file in the “File Path” field.
You can send the “Obligation” for approval as described in the following steps:
1. Click “Send For Approval” for the selected Obligation.
a. If the configured obligation is time-based, upon approval, the system generates the first instance of the Fulfillment.
b. The Obligation’s Team can be configured for the approver’s role. When the Obligation is sent for approval, it will create an approval task to the approvers on its Team.
2. Click “Yes” (or “No”) to confirm.
The obligation is now approved with the official status being displayed as “Approved”.
If for some business reason, for a given obligation, it is required to hold some fulfillment instances, you can set the Obligation on Hold. This will prevent creating new fulfillment instances during the period of hold. You can set the expiry date of the hold using the Hold Expiry Date attribute.
To apply a hold on an obligation:
1. Click "Hold". The “Association Hold Note” popup window opens.
You can release the hold before the “Hold Expiry Date” by clicking the “Release Hold” button.
1. Click the “Release Hold” button. The Association Release Hold window opens.
2. Enter a hold note.
3. Select the appropriate “Reason Code”.
4. Click “Add”.
The Obligation goes back to the previous state before it went on hold.
You can withdraw an obligation to send the obligation to Withdrawn state and all user actions are removed.
To withdraw an Obligation:
1. Click "Withdraw". The "Association Withdraw" window opens.
2. Enter a withdraw note.
3. Select the appropriate Reason Code.
4. Click "Add".
As a standard ICI platform capability, to replace user at the associated document level. User can be replaced in the following ways:
You can replace a user in Obligation from the Team tab.
1. Click "Team". The "Add Team" window opens.
2. Click "Replace User".
Let us create a contract type (such as SOW) to understand inheritance in obligation (for example, from MSA_OM to SOW_OM).
Assuming that your instance has an SOW Agreement Contract Type, let us now edit its configuration to add association for tracking Obligations. After this, both our agreements MSA_OM & SOW_OM will start tracking Obligations.
Additionally, we will configure inheritance such that any Obligation that is approved in higher agreement type (e.g. MSA_OM) will be inherited to child agreement type (e.g. SOW_OM) in order to force compliance of contractual obligations.
1. Click the Configuration tile, click the “Contract Types” option.
2. Select the Agreement Contract Type for which you want to configure obligations. For example, “OM Basic Agreement”.
19. Enter the details in the remaining tabs such as Display Preference, Team, and Verify.
20. Click Update. The contract type SOW_OM is updated having an Associated Contract Type (Obligation).
Let us an example of inheriting obligations from the parent agreement (for example, MSA_OM obligations to SOW_OM).
1. Click the Agreement Management tile on the Dashboard. The Agreement Management page opens.
All approved obligations of the MSA_OM agreement (Parent agreement) have been inherited by the SOW_OM agreement (Child). Any changes made to the parent contracts obligations have been cascaded to the child agreement's obligations.
The ICI Obligation Management app comes with a seeded Contract Type i.e. “ICMOMAppFulfillment”. As described earlier, Fulfillment is an association to the Obligation entity.
“ICMOMAppFulfillment” – This is an Associated Document Contract Type. It comes with a seeded set of attributes, workflow, rules and notifications. Implementation teams can easily tweak the configuration as per the customer’s requirements.
For more information about Fulfillment Contract Type, refer to the “ICI Obligation Management Configuration Guide”.
The following attribute values are copied from Obligation to the associated Fulfillment, attributes marked with a red asterisk * are MANDATORY:
The following attributes are used to capture Fulfillments completion, besides the aforementioned attributes used from obligation:
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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