Ivalua: Streamlined 'Buy-Side' Contracts

In an age when every business process is “connected,” supplier contracts have evolved from a simple agreement between the buyer and supplier to an integral part of the entire procurement and supplier management lifecycle. Sitting right at the apex of strategic aspects—such as supplier details, negotiations, and commitments—and day-to-day transactional activities such as invoicing, payment and terms of the contract, contracts need to be carefully managed. Helping companies bridge the conformations of the strategic actions and the oversight of daily transactions through contracts, Ivalua provides a full suite of supplier-related contracting modules meant to address every aspect of working with a supplier. This includes supplier information management, sourcing, contracting, requisitioning, ordering, receiving, invoicing, and payments.

Ivalua's suite of modules specializes in buy-side contracts that power its complete lifecycle starting with a contract that is created based on a newly awarded supplier emerging from the sourcing process. Ivalua is optimized to allow for a few clicks from the non-legal sourcing manager to create a contract, load it with pricing and terms and then generate a written contract based on the legal template. Ivalua’s workflow then guides the process through a legal review, supplier negotiation, approval by finance and others and then the signature process. Contract managers can even keep track of periodic contract performance reviews, amendments, renewals, and the termination process. “Ivalua is unique in the extent to which custom fields, tables, alerts, and notifications may be configured into the contract management tool in conformance to specific company and industry requirements,” explains Paul Noel, Chief Customer Officer of Ivalua.

Ivalua breaks down the contracts functionality into three modules. ‘Contract Management' includes contract header, date management, contract team management, and contract lifecycle workflow, and ‘Pricelist and Catalog' contains contract and catalog Items with supplier info and pricing and portal for vendor management of catalogs. Finally, ‘Contract Authoring' can be used for online HTML editing of contract clauses, managing contract versions, export/imports to Word and for clause repository and contract template management.