Lava Systems Africa, an affinity partner of Canadian-based Open Text, and one of the companies within the Enterprise Content & Wireless (ECW) Group, today announced the latest version of Livelink ECM - Contract Lifecycle Management, the most comprehensive solution on the market for contract creation, negotiation, contract fulfilment and renewals.
The solution is designed from the ground up to help businesses reduce operating costs and enable compliance with internal and external policies and regulations.
With ongoing legal and regulatory concerns, including eDiscovery challenges, corporate and auditing scandals, and new internal governance rules, organisations now place a greater focus on the effective management of contracts.
Livelink ECM - Contract Lifecycle Management offers organisations a comprehensive solution to automate and manage contract processes from creation of individual clauses to secure collaboration during the negotiation process; proactive alerts for contracts that require review and tracking of clauses, renewal dates and terms; and retention, archival and disposition of contracts to satisfy compliance, legal and business policy requirements. The solution also integrates with a variety of enterprise systems so that contract content can be made available in other environments.
"Open Text understands the mission-critical nature of contract life cycle management for an organisation's ability to comply with regulations, reduce costs and mitigate risk," commented Brett Shellhammer, Vice-President and General Manager of Open Text's Global 2000 and Government Solutions.
"Livelink ECM - Contract Lifecycle Management allows contracts and related information to be generated and managed electronically, streamlining contract creation, reporting and administration, and helping organisations manage their risk, control costs and maximise revenue effectively."
The newest version of Livelink ECM - Contract Lifecycle Management includes:
* Template driven contract creation: Livelink ECM - Contract Lifecycle Management features an intuitive, reusable template-driven approach to enable companies to create contracts and construct complex agreements within pre-planned and pre-approved parameters, improving efficiencies and reducing costs. By automating repetitive tasks associated with contract creation, organisations minimise errors and streamline the approval processes. This enables resource constrained groups, such as legal and procurement, to focus on the creation of approved contract templates and best practices.
* Integration with back-office applications: When building contracts, users can pull information from a clause library maintained within Livelink ECM and can also interact with line-of-business systems, such as CRM and ERP applications, in particular SAP solutions, ensuring accurate, up-to-date data is selected.
* Proactive report & alert management: Organisations can take advantage of proactive alerts and management reports in order to maximise the value of supplier relationships and to encourage compliance to committed contract terms and conditions. Proactive management of contract terms is one more way that the Open Text system can help organisations manage their risk exposure more effectively and extract greater value out of business transactions.
"With increasingly stringent legislation and regulations surrounding the disclosure of corporate information, it is no longer satisfactory to produce an archived paper contract to a regulator or auditor when requested," added Shellhammer.
"Corporate governance legislation, such as the US Sarbanes Oxley Act or the European Union's Directive on Corporate Governance, now requires that organisations provide evidence they are in control of the entire contract process, including the contract creation, storage and ongoing management. Livelink ECM - Contract Lifecycle Management ensures complete transparency for all information affecting a business transaction."
For further information, please contact Ray Dalgarno, Lava Systems Africa: tel 011 675-7193, fax 011 675-4075, e-mail rayd@lavasystems.co.za
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ECW is the merged entity of Lava Systems Africa and Lava Systems Mobile (LSM).
The Lava Systems Africa (LSA) team originated in the late 1990s with the objective of becoming a premier supplier of enterprise systems based on knowledge management, document management, records management, image management, collaboration and workflow solutions. The emerging demands that were identified included government process re-engineering, supply chain co-ordination, customer relationship management, e-government and B2B processing. In support of these business aims, the technology platforms chosen had to enjoy a proven global track-record and adhere to open Internet architecture standards and developments. LSA is a South African-based company dedicated to the sales, marketing, support and consultancy founded upon the Livelink product suite from Open Text, a product the staff has been involved with since 1998. LSA user base embraces customers from both the private and public sector and includes organisations such as Bateman Projects Limited, Alexander Forbes, the Gauteng Provincial Government and the National Social Security Fund of Uganda. Lava Systems Mobile, a company focusing on the development of mobile applications and tools, was originally created in 2005 and later that year absorbed KeyTools, a well-established mobile applications software developer with international links.
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