Weagree - Contract automation accelerated business transactions

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Contract automation accelerates

Without adequate contract automation (aka contract assembly or document automation), creating a contract can be an uphill battle. Contracting processes often contain complications. Some business transactions are not even agreed in a contract (exposing the company to excessive liability).

Most parts of contract creation are fact-finding, can be delegated, allow process optimisation and risk management to be automated. With contract automation, response times turn to zero, you will sprint at deal-momentum.

For clarity of terminology: if we talk about contract automation (or document assembly), that relates to the contract creation stage (incl. e-signing). If you are interested in the post-negotiation stage, visit our contract lifecycle management software (CLM) pages.

With contract automation software, contract creation processes are streamlined, consistent and controlled: you will answer a questionnaire and generate a first-time-right draft agreement based on your own model contract templates.

Optimise contract creation by integrating Weagree with SharePoint, Salesforce, CRM and other applications, with advanced approval workflows and plug in e-signing. 

Experience the Weagree Wizard yourself (it’s free, secure and anonymous).

Contract automation - business case

Weagree’s contract automation wizard solves many problems:

  1. Long response times of a legal department
  2. Slow contract creation and struggles in contract fact-finding
  3. Inconsistencies and noise in your first-draft contracts
  4. Long transaction cycle (slow time-to-signature)
  5. Non-compliance with contracting requirements
  6. Poor or absent contract know-how management
  7. Inadequate internal controls and poor status monitoring
  8. Senior people do bottom-end work

If you want to understand your business case for contract automation better, we have explained it in more detail.

There’s more to contract automation than ‘just’ an acceleration. Let’s dive into it. Weagree solves more of your problems:

The business case is impressive, solving at least eight contract and process-related challenges.
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Clause library

– prevent re-inventing the wheel

Contracts for which legal counsel are consulted, usually require a specialty. The one additional arrangement unanticipated in your template: for the transaction with a key supplier, for the one strategic element in a collaboration, or the risky part of supplying a competitor. A clause library integrated with contract automation…

Otherwise the legal counsel was called upon to draft a provision. Often from scratch (aka: re-invent the wheel). Or to consult colleagues to find a proper example.

A key characteristic of the Weagree Wizard is the central, searchable clause library. This library serves as a repository of reusable contract building blocks, ensuring high quality and consistency in contract templates. With a clause library, errors and inconsistencies are avoided.

A clause library empowers legal counsel with direct access:

  1. for exceptional cases not covered by the contract template, and
  2. for tailoring markup clauses in a contract received from the other party.

Thanks to the centralised and integrated nature of Weagree’s clause library integrated with contract automation, your contract maintenance work is minimised.

A clause library integrated with contract automation is what makes the difference for every lawyer: plugging in clauses with just one mouse-click into your contract.
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Realtime editor (WYSIWYG)

– edit contracts with a real-time editor

  • Real-time editing and redlining
  • Automatic contract versioning
  • Tablet & smartphone responsive layout

For many people, contract automation feels like abandoning control. Filling out a questionnaire is unsettling, like walking through a dark tunnel. If you cannot immediately check your answer or verify if the necessary nuance is present, you prefer a word document (for ease of use). This is where delay and inefficiency join the race. It’s also where having a real-time editor (WYSIWYG) for contracts makes the difference.

Edit and track changes to your contract. Easily tweak your contract real-time. Double-check your contract in a WYSIWYG viewer (your underwater screen) as you answer the questionnaire. The generated Word document includes all your tweaks as if they had always been there all the time.

View in split-screen mode. The real-time WYSIWYG screen can be separated from the browser. While answering the Q&A, simply detach Weagree’s real-time editor and move it to a second monitor. On mobile phones, swipe to access the real-time editor.

Save time collaborating. End-users can comment, propose or discuss changes with colleagues by @mentioning a colleague – while continuing to answer the Q&A questions. The under-water-screen will track the changes (redlining).

Template Post-its. End-users can give feedback on questionnaires, contract clauses or Q&A options. The feedback is collected in the admin tooling. Admins, with just one click access, can apply all feedback into the right template. Your template is updated in a few clicks. Weagree makes template maintenance super-easy. No more Post-its or notebook scribbles for improving your templates.

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e-Signing

– no hassle, save time and effort 

Traditional signing of contracts is slow, burdensome and laborious. It requires reminders and some signed contracts are just never returned. Not having e-signing plugins with contracting process has become like cycling with wooden wheels.

How delightful would it be to get your contracts e-signed, sealed and delivered all from within one and the same place?!

The Weagree Wizard has fully integrated plugins:

  • to receive and manage the e-signing receipts,
  • to monitor your signing process,

Are you ready to accelerate your business? Implement e-signing in a few minutes only! 

No extra charge for using the existing plugins; no extra charge for supporting you configuring our plugins, and if you want an integration that we have on our roadmap, we are happy to develop it for you.

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Contracting dashboards

…increase productivity by 1300%

It sounds exciting: to increase productivity by 1300 percent. But there is no magic wand to simply achieve 1300 percent. For productivity improvements you must have detailed insight in (i) the bottlenecks in your processes, and (ii) where in the process time is lost ‘for no reason’.

Weagree analyse or report dashboard overview

Contract data visualisations and contract reporting dashboards support the gamification of contracting, resulting in:

  • Improved decision making (optimised mix between instinct and intuition vs. fact-driven decisions),
  • Legal policies and legal decisions visualised (full transparency)
  • Increasing the trustworthiness of data and therefore confidence in legal decision-making
  • Insight into options for contract automation (eliminate manual subprocesses)
  • Contract data readily available (increased visibility of operations and risk exposure, thanks to immediate insight into rights and obligations)
  • Improved productivity by re-directing (organisational and individual) focus from manual processes towards revenue-driven orientation
  • Automated reporting (automated aggregation of management data and automated creation of legal reports)
  • Accelerating the contract cycle, customer satisfaction and contributing to profitability are the result
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Guest-user access

– to complete your Q&A

The small things in contract automation are still inhibitory. More than you like, they slow down the process. Contracting has become collaborative and so has Weagree. Invite the other party as a guest to help you answering the questionnaire.

Just enter the e-mail address, write a personal invite, click send, and wait… (for the remaining answers to come in ‘automatically’).

It is so convenient to invite a guest to answer the Q&A and fill in the gaps. Watch it yourself! 

Happy to complete the deal expeditiously. 

Note: Guest access users are included in the licence of the inviting contract automation user.

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Approval workflows

for adequate internal controls and robust risk management 

If any contract or given Q&A-answer requires the prior approval by senior management or any other stakeholder, the contract approval can be obtained through Weagree. Weagree’s contract approval workflow functionality is advanced:

  • senior-management approvals can be preceded by junior-level checks and filtering;
  • contract approval workflows can operate parallel (e.g. such that an approval by operational or financial approvers is not delayed by waiting for legal approval);
  • approvers can communicate with each other and the submitter (to ask the submitter for explanation, to given conditions for approval, or to explain a rejection);
  • Q&A questions may trigger answer-dependent approval workflows (e.g. dependent on value or costs).

Weagree’s approval workflow allows a legal department to introduce or differentiate approval requirements and to monitor compliance. An adequate contract-creation-approval workflow justifies access rights to the contract creation stage for business managers, with the option to release the contract itself only after approval by the responsible in-house lawyer.

Weagree’s contract approval workflow is probably more extensive and might have more features than you think.

Approval workflows provide a legal department with adequate internal controls and robust risk management: enforcing compliance and permitting delegation of contract creation work.

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Document management (DMS)

– a Weagree workspace with contract negotiations management

Weagree’s DMS accelerates the entire contract lifecycle, end-to-end, and automates countless manual user actions. It’s the user’s permanent workplace for organising and managing all pending contracts.

It is possible to upload contracts, contract-related files, schedules and contract versions not originating from Weagree’s contract automation.

Managing contract versions and making compares takes only two clicks. To see full capabilities of Weagree’s document management system, watch the video below. 

A true workspace where all your contracting work comes together.

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Large transaction management

– projects with clustered contracts 

Many large transactions such as M&A-transactions, financing-transactions and construction projects often entail the creation of hundreds or thousands of documents and monitoring them involves many stakeholders. Everyone involved must only see what is relevant to them. This becomes increasingly challenging when contract data is to be reused in multiple documents, or when that data is updated during project preparations or implementation. 

You can easily create, manage, and coordinate complex and large transactions within Weagree.

  • Create large sets of inter-related documents (both, small and large)
  • manage tasks through (automated or manual) project-dedicated tasks Kanban
  • reuse the answers given in one Q&A for creating the related contracts and documents
  • End-users from different user groups participate in the transaction and can see the existence of templates to which they do not have access rights. However, they can not modify the Q&A answers if they are not entitled
  • Bulk e-sign documents 

and much more…

Watch how Deutsche Bahn uses Weagree to automate and manage all types of construction projects on a day-to-day basis.

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Feedback management

– Super-easy template maintenance

Within Weagree, end-users have the possibility to give feedback on questionnaires, contract text, Q&A options, etc. The feedback is collected centrally, in the admin tooling. Admins have one-click access bringing them straight to the commented contract clause (in the right template, at the right Q&A-point etc.) and can implement the proposed change with one click.

Super-easy template maintenance! No Post-its or lost notebook scribbles for maintaining your templates at the highest standards!

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Many top-class templates included

The Weagree Wizard is equipped with a set of high quality contract templates. Customers are free to modify and expand the automated templates or Q&A-options according to your business requirements.

The model contracts include (without limitation) those that we have shared in Word-format (in the Weagree Wizard they are automated with an advanced questionnaire). As a licensee, you are free to use them in your own business.

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Walkthrough video - Contract automation

This video highlights step-by-step how to accelerate your contract flow – from the creation stage, with an integrated clause library, to supporting your know-how management. Watch it yourself: 

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Try contract automation yourself

Now that you’ve come this far, why don’t you try it yourself? We have automated a contract template, guiding you through a questionnaire and highlighting a few key functionalities:

Experience Weagree’s contract automation yourself (it’s free, secure, and anonymous).

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Terms of Use

I hereby accept (or reconfirm my acceptance of) Weagree’ Terms of use, in which:

Terms of Use

I hereby accept (or reconfirm my acceptance of) Weagree’ Terms of use, in which: