The purpose of this blog is to give a brief overview of the “Advanced clause change support” functionality in SAP Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) Wave 8, support pack 1.
Contract authoring is one of the key features of SAP Contract Lifecycle Management. Organizations that have predefined contracting best practices and standard language for contracts usually adopt a template based approach for generation of contract documents. Contracting departments in organizations usually work with their respective legal teams to finalize a set of standard clause language that can be included in their contract documents. As a best practice, a clause library containing a set of standard clauses and corresponding contract document templates can be pre-defined. When starting the contract creation and consequent negotiation process, companies prefer to start with such pre-defined contract document templates. The SAP CLM contract authoring feature uses these predefined contract document templates to create legal contract documents that can be shared both internally and externally with the different stakeholders. Once a legal contract document is created, various stakeholders usually collaborate on finalizing the language in the contract and in the process create multiple versions of the contract document.
SAP CLM provides standard document comparison capability to identify and highlight the changes in the different versions of the entire contract document. However a single legal contract can contain hundreds of different clauses depending on the complexity and structure of the contract. As a result it gets very difficult to identify changes to specific clauses within multiple document versions. The ‘Advanced clause change support’ enhancement aims at giving the end users clause level visibility in the contract documents.
Following are the key features of this enhancement:
1. Outline view (showing all sections and clauses) of a CLM authored contract document
2. Outline view, showing only changed clauses in a CLM authored contract document
Figure below shows the outline view of a CLM authored contract document
The figure below shows the outline view with only the changed clauses in the contract.
3. Capture changes in the contract document at a clause level
3a. Show latest content of any clause in the contract document
3b. Show comparison version between the latest content and library content of any clause in the contract document
Figure below shows two different views (latest and comparison views) of a single clause in the contract document. For an end user it becomes easy to view changes to clauses in individual word documents rather than searching through the entire contract to view the changes. Depending on individual end-user needs one can use either of the two approaches to view clause changes (i.e. Either through the entire contract documents or through individual clause documents as shown below).
6. Ability to customize a CLM authored contract by adding new clauses, removing existing clauses and replacing existing clauses with alternate or fallback language. This can be done while maintaining all the preceding changes that may have happened to the contract until then. Clicking on the ‘Customize Contract’ button highlighted in red in the 'Outline View' above, triggers the contract authoring wizard and gives the end user the ability to add, remove or replace clauses.
This feature will be available only for those contract documents that are authored using Microsoft Word 2007 and 2010 versions.
Thanks and stay tuned for more blogs on upcoming features in SAP Sourcing and CLM.
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