A global pharma company’s Business Development & Licensing (BD&L) team was facing issues with managing their service contracts and investments while maintaining audit compliance. In each department BD&L teams used manual methods such as excel sheets to maintain basic details of all the contracts pertaining to the department. However, this led to gaps in capturing information, as excel sheets needed considerable manual effort to capture real-time information and there was no provision to capture the approval logs. There was also a communication gap within the team due to the lack of a central platform to view all the contracts information in one place. 

The client was looking for customized solutions which can help various stakeholders within the BD&L team maintain a central repository of all the contracts, as well as manage them efficiently. Some of their other requirements were scalability, data security and rapid deployment.

After thorough analysis of the client’s requirements, our digital transformation experts recommended they use the trusted SharePoint to build a contract management solution. Using SharePoint meant top tier data security, low chances of downtime and most of all no extra infrastructure cost. Additionally, the client could leverage other applications within the 0365 umbrella to achieve additional functionalities and automations. 

End-to-end contract tracking: We built a comprehensive contracts management solution customizing SharePoint where the entire journey of the contract right from raising a request to executing of the agreements was tracked. The solution also provides role-based rights to add details, approve and upload documents. It also logs all the changes made throughout the lifecycle of the contract.  

Comprehensive view: The BD&L team, along with the contract stakeholders, had a comprehensive dashboard of all the contracts arranged in terms of the stages they are in with provision to filter and export to excel. The solution also tracked the entry and change logs for all the contracts across their life cycle. This helped the teams and stakeholders understand the progress of the contract, and they also got a comprehensive view of the contract.

Milestones tracking: The client’s team could track both financial and deliverables to understand if the milestones and the payments are on track. This functionality also helped the BD&L team to have a comprehensive view of the total budget spent/ remaining.

Project amendments tracking: The solution also assisted in tracking the amendments if needed. An amendment is any change in the timelines or delays in the contract execution. There was also provision for separate workflows for cost and non-cost amendments. The stakeholders also had a single view of the original contract, history of amendments, and milestones

Forecasting: Based on the milestone’s information tracked, the solution also provided the budgetary forecasts for each contract/ investment. This helped the BD&L team to block budgets for each contract and make accurate budgetary decisions. The solution helped the stakeholders to monitor the progress of each contract and accordingly release payments.