No team works in a bubble. Every department in an organization is a gear in a machine, each working to drive a business towards success. Whether it is the Compliance, Finance, Human Resources, Legal, or Sales, each aspect depends on the other, and each is equally important to the overall success of an enterprise.

Communication is key for collaboration. Unfortunately, many organizations rely on archaic models which implement tools and software that are inherently siloed, and sacrifice flexibility for perceived security.

Automated Document / Contract Lifecycle Management software solutions factor in the importance of different teams sharing information securely but freely.

Automatic Population of Documents

Automation tools that allow automatically extract data to populate documents can help many different departments. For instance:

• Sales teams can pull data from customer relationship management systems (CRMs) to populate contracts.
• Compliance teams can pull information from your document automation database to run Know Your Customer (KYC) reports.
• Finance Teams extract data from sales and vendor contracts to populate company reports.

User Groups

Departments, teams, and working groups can all be assigned to User Groups with fixed permissions and access. For example,

• Legal may safely share confidential documents with other members of the legal team User Group, without worrying about adding extra security. 
• Any department may use Guest settings to grant temporary document access to an external party. Although flexible, the permissions and restrictions can be controlled closely, and rescinded at any time.

Document Sharing; Workflows & Approvals

After a document is created, it can be Shared with other users, User Groups, or even externally. Collaboration with other teams can be streamlined using automated Workflows which automatically send documents to users, or User Groups for Approval. For instance:

• Sales teams can submit contracts to the finance or product teams for approvals on fees or special use cases. 
• Legal teams may need to review and negotiate contracts submitted by a sales team, or may need to review Human Resources documents (e.g., employment contracts, redundancy notices, etc.).
• Finance departments can quickly and securely share quarterly and annual reports with company executives.
• Compliance and Audit teams may need to review and or revise company policies drafted by the Human Resources team, or confirm that new product specifications meet regulatory requirements.

Real-Time Conversations

Different individuals may find the need to collaborate on a document at the same time, and document conversations speed up review process by allowing different team members or teams to share information in real time.  

• Legal Teams can speed up negotiations by sharing drafting ideas quickly rather than emailing back and forth.
• Human Resources can work with the finance and compliance teams on the details of an employee offer to ensure that the offer meets company standards, and protections (e.g., accurate salary, ownership of IP).

This is only a sample of some automation features that help teams communicate and support one another in daily operations. An automated document management solution that increasing transparency and accessibility is guaranteed to increase efficiency and growth. 

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