Try asking yourself the following question. When was the last work day you did not use Google or use a search function in your work email or office network? Bet it wasn’t very long ago.

The simple “Search” function of applications we use daily has become one of the most important productivity tools of the last few decades. For many office workers, a huge percentage of the day, in any given week, is spent on the hunt for information in various digital formats.

Now consider what would happen if none of your Word, Excel, or Email messages or customer resource management records were in digital format; if they were all paper-based?

Unfortunately, this is the exact case many companies find themselves in when it comes to contracts and related records. They don’t even have to be paper to be “unsearchable” – all they have to be is decentralized, stored haphazardly across a handful of departments, in several different file formats.

These days, unsearchable means unproductive and time-consuming. Contract management solutions solve this problem by converting contract information into digital records – and thus making them searchable in real time.

That’s a huge bonus when it comes to productivity. Many business departments may need to access key contract information when it’s time sensitive:

Sales departments may need to reference a prior contract’s value when making an additional sale to an existing customer. And as anyone in sales can confirm, speed in closing a contract is often the difference between a “yes” and a “no.”
Legal departments, too, may need to review prior contracts or examine related records when drafting new contracts or reviewing contracts for breaches (either by the company itself of a vendor/solution provider). This can be time sensitive as well.
Business development may need to see key provisions of a partnership agreement before moving ahead quickly on a new opportunity.

Without the capability to search contract records for key information located in fields or even in notes, the speedy recall of contract data can be a cumbersome process. A solution like Contract Assistant makes search easy – and users can even save some of their searches.

An added layer of search functionality in the Contract Assistant Enterprise Edition includes the ability to use full-text search for stored documents. If you consider all the documents that may be related to a contract (and the contracts themselves), that’s a huge plus when you need to do a “deep dive” for information.

If you consider that as the economy improves, more contract work will be needed (and contracts have a habit of becoming more complex over time) a stored document library can quickly grow to thousands of pages.

Without the ability to search those records, as a group, productivity can easily nosedive.

The Enterprise Edition also features the ability to create a library of private searches – useful when sensitive information is recalled often.

If you or your department will be administering or managing future contract management, keep in mind the importance of search capabilities when it comes choosing your solution. After all, a day without search … is a day without productivity.