Contract Clause Approval
Recently, I have spoken to a few people about implementing approval logic for CLM Contract Clauses. For those of you that are familiar with CLM, you know that it does not provide an “out of the box” capability to enforce clause approvals.
Not to worry, however, because the flexible E-Sourcing / CLM scripting capabilities make implementing approval logic for clauses pretty straightforward. In this post, I will describe one approach that I put together for a recent sales demonstration.
The components of my clause approval configuration were:
- Created an extension (custom field) on the clause master data object that was a reference to the user group that is required to approve the clause
- Using page customizations, the approver extension field on the clause master data was made read only
- Using script definition, the approver extension field was populated with the name of the user group that is required to approve the clause. In many organizations, this would be some set of people from the procurement legal department.
The above three configurations provided the framework for the approval process by defining the approver on the clause master data.
In addition to the above configurations, one additional script definition was required. That script definition was implemented as a Field Data Edit script on the PHASE field of clauses. The script included two sets of logic:
- The first logic was based on the phase being changed to Approved. If the new phase was set to Approved and the user performing the change was a member of the approver user group, it was allowed; if the user was not a member of the approver user group, an error was generated and the phase change was not permitted. This logic ensured that only members of the approver user group approved the clause.
- The second logic was to send an email to the legal user group when the new phase of the clause was Review. This ensured that the members of the legal approval group received notification when there was a clause to approve.
So, what do you think? I understand that this is not using the E-Sourcing / CLM workflow approval capabilities, but is it good enough? Would this level of approval work for you? Based on what I have seen with customers, this approach would be more than suitable, but I would love to hear your feedback.
Overall, implementation of a solution like the above should not take more than a few days to prepare, configure, code, test, and deploy. For me, that is very exciting because it demonstrates the real power of the E-Sourcing / CLM capabilities such as extensions, page customizations, and scripting.
Thanks for stopping by and reading my latest post.
Rob