July 9, 2009 - London – IBX, the pioneer in the field of e-purchasing services and solutions, today announced the launch of its fully-hosted contract lifecycle management solution, called ‘IBX Contract Management’. The on-demand system provides a central source for companies to manage, create and negotiate contracts. As a result risks are minimised and administrative overheads reduced.

Enterprises face a whole host of contract management challenges, including loss of documents, difficulty tracking versions made by others and having to carry out time consuming administrative tasks. IBX Contract Management is a fully-integrated, on-demand application which enables enterprises to manage the complete contract lifecycle.

IBX Contract Management creates a centralised repository of contracts and contract templates, allowing users to filter contracts based on different dimensions, such as contract expiry date and contract currency. In addition, contract administrators can maintain a clause library in accordance with the enterprises’s business processes and procedures, using it to create contract documents, which can be configured based on the available templates.

The contract management process has traditionally posed numerous business challenges. Firstly, businesses have struggled to find an efficient way to get different departments to share their information. Secondly, the contract approval workflow can be a convoluted process, wasting time and resources. Lastly, an inability to audit contracts can result in companies getting stuck in expensive and ineffectual agreements.

IBX Contract Management is an on-demand offering which includes rapid deployment across enterprises (typically implemented within 3 weeks), speedy user adaptation and best practices through IBX core team services.

“A multinational enterprise may have 20 offices and 50,000 staff ordering different products from a wide range of local and central contracts, at different times and from different sources, resulting not only in a huge cost, but also a huge administrative nightmare,” said Mark Masterson, Managing Director at IBX UK . “Automating the process through one centralised system can reduce spending and cut risk. Now is the time for purchasing departments to fulfil their potential and demonstrate to the wider business the huge financial benefits a streamlined contract management system can have.”

IBX Contract Management is seamlessly integrated with IBX eSourcing, closing the loop between sourcing to procurement. It gives geographically diverse enterprises the ability to shorten the contract creation, negotiation and approval process by using a central contract repository.

The whole contract management process draws on IBX’s partnership with SAP, maximising the value of the existing SAP solutions-based environments. By harnessing the SAP ® Contract Lifecycle Management (SAP CLM) application, customers are also offered greater flexibility to individually design each system to match their specific business requirements which can be easily integrated with their own SAP ERP solutions.