Regardless of the size of the company, contracts and their specific conditions practically always form the basis of existing and future business relationships. Accordingly, it is worthwhile for companies to take a comprehensive look at the entire contract management process, from contract creation to contract management and organization to contract amendments and renewals. Even in 2020, an astonishing proportion of all contracts is still processed manually and in paper form. But especially in the age of COVID-19, it is more important than ever to reduce costs and at the same time increase revenues wherever possible. This makes it all the more important to have a way of extracting contracts, and above all the relevant information and data in the contracts, simply, quickly and cost-effectively. Read on to learn more about how modern document extraction does this.
Filing cabinets full of documents, including countless contracts, create headaches for many companies, especially for employees in this area. No matter how meticulously structured and tidy the archive may be, it yet takes half an eternity to find the desired contract, let alone the desired information in the contract. Admittedly, this picture is probably a little exaggerated. Nevertheless, the following one does not look very rosy either: In somewhat more advanced companies, contracts are scanned in paper form and stored digitally, so they are at least in the system and can be localized, but this does not really improve the situation. Because even so, contract management is an unnecessarily tedious task and consumes a lot of time resources, which is neither effective nor efficient.
In times of COVID and the efforts of many companies to reduce costs or to keep them as low as possible, it seems to be the wrong time, at first sight, to move away from well-tried methods in contract management. But this is not true. It is definitely the right time to leave this work to modern technology and to create space for your important specialists who can instead focus on other important tasks. The technology that comes into play here is flexible OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software that offers significant benefits around contract management for companies, including the following
- Context from content: With OCR, all specific and valuable data and information can be extracted from contract documents, including all legal terms
- Contract organization: Through extraction with OCR, all data is structurally delivered to your document management system (DMS) or contract management system in the way it needs to be: quickly and specifically localized and accessible to all parties involved. Manual (paper) search in the file room bye bye
- Contract verification: Existing contracts are checked with OCR and simply searched through for individual relevant data. This also means that contracts are not simply renewed automatically, but that you are notified, for example, under the conditions you specify, so that you can make adjustments quickly and easily
- Eliminates duplicate work: Depending on the size of the company, different departments are involved in contract management, which with manual processing always leads to the risk of redundant work and thus becoming inefficient. With modern document management, where extraction is a core element, this problem is eliminated
- Increased security: A powerful OCR completely avoids the error-proneness that is a problem in manual processing. In addition, far fewer human eyes see the documents and their partly sensitive information = higher compliance and thus reduced risks
- Productivity: With OCR, documents are processed accurately, inexpensively and super fast, which generally results in a significantly faster throughput time than when processed manually
- Handwritten Text Recognition: OCR and HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition; read more about it here) can be used to recognize and extract old paper contracts, forwarded documents, signed documents, etc.
The advantages of using modern document extraction in contract management are obvious. The concerns of employees in this segment that, depending on the size of the company, entire clerks may become superfluous are unfounded. Software-supported document extraction merely relieves these teams of tedious and repetitive work, namely checking and processing contracts, and creates space for them to devote themselves to more complex legal matters.
