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Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM)

Supplier Management

Objective

A solution to handle all legal aspects of supplier onboarding, negotiation, compliance, and contract portfolio management.

Our Client

This solution applies to all clients who need to manage the contracts of their service and product suppliers, whether integrated with other CRM, ERP, or SRM tools or not.

Management can involve external organization suppliers (clients of law firms or companies within the same economic group) or suppliers of the organization holding the Looplex platform account. When managing your own suppliers, the solution can be integrated with Looplex Finance1.

Challenges

ERP and CRM systems for collaborative spending, finance, and procurement management are excellent but do little to improve interactions between the company and its suppliers, particularly in compliance and legal risk management.

B2B transactions are still managed with a fragmented matrix of applications and manual processes, leaving the legal team facing numerous obstacles in controlling risks, ensuring hiring compliance with company policies, and interacting with operational and financial teams.

It’s crucial to give visibility and effectively connect the legal department to the supplier relationship journey. This integration is essential for reducing risks, improving quality, and enhancing organizational efficiency.

CLM (Contract Lifecycle Management) automates and streamlines contract processes during key phases, including initiation, authoring (generation or contract analysis), negotiation and approval, signing, monitoring and auditing, and renewal or closure.

While organizations can fully customize every aspect of legal engineering in the Looplex implementation, this process becomes much faster and less costly using a pre-configured solution on the platform, requiring only parameterization.

Solution

We implement a combined portfolio of content automation templates, management tools, workflows, and legal analytics to handle the onboarding and legal compliance management of product and service suppliers.

By standardizing data, we provide a library of pre-configured entities and data structures, eliminating a substantial portion of setup, drafting, and analysis time. This approach also gives the legal team the freedom to experiment with integration into other business systems and processes.

Creating a common data language, dynamic models, unified terms, and consistent and repeatable conditions saves time and reduces errors for buyers and suppliers. To automate and accelerate the process, the following are necessary:

  • Legal involvement in the procurement process.
  • Digital conversion of internal contracts and compliance checklists for external received drafts.
  • Automated contract generation using pre-approved legal clause templates or automated analysis of external documents.
  • Standardization and control of the contract negotiation and review process.
  • License and intellectual property management.
  • Contract compliance and performance management.

1. Sourcing and Procurement

Incorporate legal compliance and adherence to company policies from the start.

Setup Legal Playbook
Set up best practices, compliance rules, contractual clauses, and organizational standard procedures for the supplier selection and contracting process through configuration in the legal playbook rules.

Incorporation into Proposals and Quotations
Automate document templates for RFIs2 (Requests for Information), RFQs3 (Requests for Quotation), or RFPs4 (Requests for Proposal), considering minimum requirements and the organization’s legal risk management policies.

Automate all legal work involved in supplier onboarding.

Enablement
Replace incomplete and non-standardized email requests with dynamic forms for self-service. Digital content and automated workflows capture essential information, triage, and define minimum requirements to start the contracting process.

Integrity Analysis
Integrate with public database systems, generate checklists for corporate documents, certificates, and necessary validations.

Negotiation
Automatically generate contracts or general terms of supply based on the type of supply, service category, delivery approval requirements, and tracking. Circulate drafts for negotiation or supplier validation.

Review (external content)
Review supplier-generated contract drafts for compliance with organizational policies, escalate internal approvals for disclosure and risk registration, and create ancillary documents (adjustment terms, amendments, declarations) to remedy or mitigate non-compliance when possible.

Signing and Archiving
Circulate contracts for electronic signing, monitor signature cycle completion, and archive in Looplex’s ECM or the organization’s storage system.

3. Monitoring and Auditing

Track contract performance to ensure deliveries align with agreements.

Monitoring and Alerts
Assign audit tasks requiring suppliers to routinely update negative certificates and registration information.

Performance Evaluation
Monitor supplier performance through operational team surveys to assess timely and satisfactory deliveries.

Remediation and Adjustments
Trigger processes for non-compliance remediation or supply review in case of negative monitoring and performance evaluation responses. Allow suppliers to address failures while the system issues warnings or escalates more severe problems.

4. Renewal or Closure

Complete the document lifecycle with renewal or contract termination processes.

Renewal
Automatically initiate the renewal process based on contract deadlines, including feedback from the affected team about continuing the supplier relationship.

Offboarding
Terminate the contractual relationship with automatic execution of checklists and tasks for document return, credential removal, payment or penalty processing, and pending value collection (if applicable).

5. Dashboards and Analytics

Data analysis views and overall contract portfolio tracking.

Tracking
View contracts and portfolio aggregated values by phase (negotiation, execution, renewal, expired); conditional payment value estimates; non-compliance or termination impact analysis; upcoming renewals and contract statuses, task listings for teams (renewal, audit, negotiation), and critical suppliers.

Performance
Rank and list supplier performance percentages, highlighting suppliers below minimum thresholds; compare physical vs. planned schedules and released payments vs. performance adherence; drill down into support evaluations, delivery quality, and service levels.

Compliance
Rank and list supplier compliance percentages, identifying non-compliant suppliers; compare released payments vs. compliance indices; drill down into evaluations for support, delivery quality, and service levels.

Timeline and Phases

After an ideation phase and implementation of necessary services for the legal engineering team to begin deliveries, we provide a prototype version and validate the roadmap for launching upcoming content and workflows. Timelines are estimates and depend on the client’s operational maturity and engagement during setup.

The implementation and use phase of this solution is typically divided into three delivery blocks:

Footnotes

  1. Module available only for law firms in the Lawsoft Classic version. For information on integrating this module with the Looplex platform, visit https://looplex.com.br/roadmap.

  2. Request For Information; when the market has many suppliers for a specific item, the RFI document helps understand market offerings and identify companies capable of meeting the company’s needs.

  3. Request for Quotation; structured and detailed specification document allowing suppliers to prepare comparable budgets for transparent procurement and informed decision-making.

  4. Request For Proposal; used when suppliers independently create budgets to meet the client’s needs, often resulting in diverse and non-comparable proposals. Commonly used when services lack RFQ standardization.