A Web-based and Email Driven Electronic Contract Management System

In an enterprise, managing and processing an electronic contract often involves a number of contract administrators and representatives in the enterprise, and their counter parts in their suppliers, business partners or their customers to carry out a large number of complex manual tasks in sequences during the life cycle of electronic contract. In most commercially available electronic contract management systems, users either waste a lot of their time in monitoring their task lists for their turns to act on their electronic contracts or most electronic contracts simply stay idle for most of the time if users only check their task lists once a while. In addition, these manual tasks are often tedious and may cause security faults. In this paper, we present a Web-based and email driven electronic contract management system that supports both internal and intra-enterprises workflows, and with multi-tenants hosting capability. This system enables a user to act on the next task in a sequence of tasks to process a particular electronic contract immediately after the other user has completed the previous task in the same sequence of tasks by sending out email notifications to alert or remind the user to take action on the task. We also describe several novel methods to automate some manual and tedious tasks, such as watermarking signature information on the signed electronic contract and life cycle management, in this paper. Most users have found their productivities improved, the electronic contract transaction time accelerated, contractual errors reduced and many other benefits by using this electronic contract management system in several IBM pilot programs.