Before we learn the need for contract metadata and how an expert in the extraction process ensures the effectiveness, let’s take a glance at the basics.
Metadata, in general, describes the digital content of varied types to facilitate its management, use, and, most importantly, discovery. If we translate this to the contract management landscape, the metadata summarizes the key contract data for effective tracking, maintenance, and improved performance. Therefore, it becomes an integral part of building a Contract Lifecycle Management system in tune with business goals and needs.
Why should you consider Contract Metadata Extraction?
With the above being said, you might now wonder what’s the need to go through this hassle. The answer is simple. Your CLM system needs contract metadata to rightly perform its intended duties. Here is how it helps.
Input for Intelligence: The best part of the contemporary CLM solutions is intelligence dashboarding, which provides you with strategic inputs for performance assessments and evidence-based business decisions. And contract metadata is one of the primary components to enable this capability in the system. A lack thereof, the CLM platform will not have clarity on the key contract parameters and how to assess them against the performance.
Evaluate contract performance: You will have to analyze the cost involved in executing a project, profits reaped, opportunities gained, and much more with the aid of contracts. To precisely add this ability to your CLM system, you indeed need contract metadata.
Better searchability: The primary objective of a CLM solution is to consolidate all contracts under a single repository. But the metadata is fundamental to establishing the system’s search functionality and ensuring maximum accuracy of the results delivered. A huge time saving is an allied merit here.
Enable real-time alerts: One of the major benefits of adopting a CLM platform is the seamless tracking of contracts’ progress and updates. By capturing key event timelines, expiration, and renewal dates, contract metadata extraction plays a pivotal role in keeping all the stakeholders informed of actions to be taken with the deadline.
Compliance Check: Certification renewals or adherence to defined timelines, it is the contract metadata that facilitates the CLM system to notify the relevant stakeholders. This goes a long way in ensuring compliance and sustaining business excellence.
Risk Assessment: What if a solution being built is redundant or an opportunity to avail a discount is missed? There are several such intricacies involved in contracts administration. And to gain timely visibility of all the key elements of contracts, you need the metadata.
To sum up, contract metadata extraction is imperative for valuable Contact Lifecycle Management. Therefore, organizations embracing a digital CLM solution ought to spend considerable man-hours and resources executing this process.
But how to nail the contract metadata extraction?
Operating in the digital era, you can not exclude the role of technology in this process. However, to achieve the best results, you need to establish a process with a perfect blend of digital tools and human expertise.
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the fundamental process in contract migration, including metadata extraction. Therefore, using the highly-advanced technology is pertinent here to scan all the contract documents, identify and store all the relevant data in a single repository, organize and assign tags against contacts to enable searchability. Now that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making headway in the CLM space, you can effectively customize data extraction from the scanned contracts at an accelerated speed.
As the machine you have chosen does the work, an expert should oversee and validate its accuracy. The involvement of humans in this machine-enabled process starts from defining the custom fields to be extracted. In other words, they help the tool understand the data fields to be identified, stored, organized, and tagged. As this system executes the process, the experts will have to do an intensive quality check to ensure that the results conform with the business needs. Widely referred to as human-in-the-loop (and lawyers-in-the-loop in the legal space), it is elemental for the fool-proof success of contract metadata extraction.
So, what are the types of metadata extracted to enable effective contract administration?
The infographic below presents an exhaustive list of contract metadata that are extracted to help a CLM system understand the true essence of the uploaded contracts.
While the clauses mentioned here are being predominantly extracted as a part of CLM deployment, the list is not the limit. It can be expanded to include exclusive requirements to bolster the value delivered at large.
Is there a not-so-burdensome way to get this done?
Yes, by liaising with an external expert, such as Cenza. The reason is the availability of essential tools, expertise, and resources. Once you finalize the CLM system to be deployed, you can use our CLM Consulting Services to gain clarity of whats and hows of the contract metadata extraction process. The discussion will eventually guide you to assess your current system’s and team’s capability and take a final call on whether to execute the extraction in-house or outsource it. If the latter option is your choice, then all you have to do is define your needs in detail, or take our experts’ guidance in identifying the critical data to be captured. With that being affirmed, our Contract Migration and Metadata Extraction experts will diligently work towards getting your CLM in order.
It is not uncommon to have the urge to know how exactly the Contract Migration process works. We have an exclusive video to help you understand the CLM migration process in a nutshell.
Contact us for a detailed overview of our services or to leverage our CLM Consulting services.
