The Contract Certainty Blog | Exari

We’ve listened. We’ve taken your feedback - and the changing landscape - into account.  This fall, we’ll release a new responsive interface in our 7.0 release of Exari DocGen™.

Wikipedia defines eating your own dog food or dogfooding as a way for a company to demonstrate confidence in its own products. The idea is that if the company expects customers to buy its products, it should also be willing to use those products itself. The marketing folk tend to refer to the same concept as the slightly more urbane "drinking your own champagne."

Don't get me wrong - I love a good home cooked meal. Fresh ingredients and loosely followed recipes mean that no two meals are ever identical. Flavors, textures and intensities always vary. Fast food is exactly the opposite - order a Big Mac anywhere in the world and you know exactly what to expect. Hilton (Conrad, not his great-granddaughter Paris) applied the same principal to his chain of hotels, with notable success.

I recently heard a story of a services firm that generated contracts from “passed around” Word templates. At some point, somebody actually read through the contract and realized the entire liabilities and indemnification section had been deleted. This contract form had been used for 2 years.

Contracts are the backbone of every organization. They define and contain every aspect of all corporate relationships; with employees, customers, vendors, partners and stakeholders. Managing your contracts efficiently amounts to managing your business efficiently. And the same holds true whether your contracts are sales contracts, insurance policies, or financial documentation such as ISDA Master Agreements.

Welcome back for installment two of The 5 Scariest Questions Your CEO Could Ask About Your Contracts, based off our recent webinar of the same name. In Part 1, we detailed the first three situations in which not knowing your contracts inside and out could make you shake in your boots: 1) an M&A event 2) a rogue vendor and 3) an MFN clause. Let's dive into the rest.

Even if you’re not scared of your CEO, you may be scared of the questions they could ask about your risk and liability. It's a good thing your contracts can probably tell you everything you need to know. We recently produced a webinar called The 5 Scariest Questions Your CEO Could Ask About Your Contracts. Pulling from the webinar, we'll go through the five scenarios in which your ability to mine into your contract data could make a massive difference to your business and your reputation.

Today we announced Exari Contracts Hub™, the newest offering to advance the practice of Contract Lifecycle Management. Who cares, you ask? Well, you should. Every business runs on contracts. And every business knows their customers (CRM) their accounts (financials) their suppliers (procurement) and their employees (HCM). What do all of these have in common? They are ruled and governed by contracts.

We spend our days pouring over numbers, making them make sense, making them grow or shrink based on what’s best for our business and the businesses of our clients. But one number has stuck in our heads and made it impossible to do nothing. Over 1.1 million kids in Florida go hungry.

All companies – from retailers to hedge funds – know that customers are their number one priority. Client obligations are always the first concern as customer satisfaction is the only reliable road to growth. The 2013 Lloyd’s Risk Index cited “loss of customer” or “abandoned transaction” as the second-most-critical business risk (ahead of cyber risk and behind taxation). First of all, we all know that it is far more expensive (according to some studies up to 10 times more) to acquire new customers than it is to retain existing ones.