Contract administrators and legal personnel may negotiate and author a vast number of complex contracts each year. Maintaining corporate control on the terms for each contract can be a time-consuming and daunting task. The application simplifies this process by providing a centralized contract terms library.
Note: The Contract Terms Library is generally referred to as the Library.
Companies that operate globally can use the library to establish company-wide standards and enforce them on a global basis. To accommodate local or country-specific regulations, they can give the local library administrators the flexibility of tailoring these global standards.
With access to the library, you can:
Manage standard clauses: Contract administrators and legal department users can create clauses that contain standard business language for use in contracts. They can create clauses based on business and legal requirements, route them for approvals, and publish them for use across the operating unit. Users can modify published clauses by creating new versions of the clause while retaining the older versions for reference and comparison. Local operating units can localize clauses, created by the global operating unit, or adopt them as is.
Manage contract templates: Companies implement best practices by creating standard contract boilerplates (templates) based on their unique contracting requirements. Contract templates enable rapid assembly and creation of contracts and minimize the overhead that is involved in legal review and approval. The use of standard language in templates ensures that all contracts comply with company and regulatory policies.
Set up Contract Expert rules: Contract Expert is a rule-based contracts authoring tool that helps organizations define their corporate standards and policies to select additional clauses automatically during authoring as well as report on how contracts deviate from their standard policies:
Clause Selection rules: These rules determine when additional clauses need to be brought into a contract. You can set up these rules in the Contract Terms Library and assign them to the appropriate contract templates. Based on the contract template that is applied, any additional information in the business document, and on answering some additional questions, Contract Expert evaluates the Clause Selection rules and recommends additional clauses to be included in the business document.
Policy Deviation rules: As a result of negotiations on contracts, companies could negotiate terms that exceed preapproved company policies and regulatory limits. The application uses the Policy Deviation rules to capture and report changes in business terms on business documents as contract deviations.
Import clauses: Using the Import feature, the contract administrator can reduce the time that is required for converting and importing clauses from external systems. To stay current with changes in business process or government regulations, you can use the Import features on an ongoing basis and import clause updates into the library. You can use one of the following methods to import clauses
Open Interface: This method is available since the 11.5.10 release.
XML Data File: This method is available only in the release 12. The XML Data File method supports import of clauses, variables, clause relationships, value sets, and value set values.
For more information, see Oracle Contracts Implementation and Administration guide.
In addition to standard clauses and contract templates, the Library supports the creation and maintenance of a library of folders, sections, and variables.
For more information, see: