ASC Blog

Data-Driven Ad-Hoc, Accurate and Actionable Business Intelligence

Posted: October 1, 2015
Written by Angie Stockley

Powerful, Interactive Data Analytics, Dashboards and Reports Deliver the Insight You Need to Make Critical Business Decisions Quickly

Your contracts, documents, forms, quotes, etc., shouldn’t just be sitting in your database waiting for the next step in the workflow to commence; they are an integral part of any business strategy and provide stakeholders with valuable and detailed information ready to be mined for competitive advantage.

The ASC reporting solution enables you to aggregate, visualize and share data critical to your business from one convenient location. Having this ability to look at your contracts holistically empowers proactive decision making at all levels, helping minimize business risks, ensure all opportunities are realized and optimize business growth and revenue potential.

The ASC solution’s robust full text out-of-the-box searching and reporting capability enable users -- power users, occasional users and IT professionals alike -- to effectively search across all records, forms, contracts, documents and quotes using single field or multi-field filters and produce reports exactly matching their required reporting criteria.

These reports can reveal whether contract processes are managed efficiently, if there are bottlenecks in your workflow, if deals are optimized for revenue generation, if unfavorable terms are up for negotiation, and which terms and conditions are most commonly redlined.

Fast and Accurate Reports

The ASC solution enables all users on-demand access to fast and accurate business insights with just a few simple steps; meaning you're always prepared to deliver executive dashboards and audit-ready reports at the speed of your business or simply to create personalized data views to ensure your contracts are performing to your expectations and goals.

Customized User Reports

Our fully customizable dashboards and reports let you easily create professional and personalized data views with powerful visualizations, so you can deliver real-time multi-format analytics for all your data and results. This ability to create custom or ad-hoc reports ensures that you have all the contracting and business insights necessary to eliminate risk, avoid expenses due to non-compliance penalties, capture additional revenue opportunities and maintain strong customer relationships.

Different functional roles and individual users need different types of reports with specific data sets. The ASC solution enables all users to create personalized reports so that executives, functional groups (e.g., legal, sales, procurement, contract admins, etc.) and other business users can get required data sets in the at-a-glance format they prefer via email notifications or at the point of system login.

While all users can create their own reports in the ASC Platform, Admins can also create reports that are shared with all users within a specific group (e.g., all Legal users will see legal-specific reports).

Report Definition

The robust reporting and tracking capabilities start with ASC’s powerful search tool (please read how our flexible search engine drives report definition) which enables you to unlock the full value of your data.  As described on our search page, all fields are searchable and searches can be expanded to include multiple values or narrowed to a single field value. Further, all searches can be saved and re-run on an ad-hoc basis or converted to regularly scheduled reports with the added ability to suppress blank searches.  Different parameters can be mapped to trigger alerts, notifications and workflows (see more about Report-Driven Notifications and Alerts below).

Report-Driven Notifications and Alerts

Because timing is everything, it is important that reports can be scheduled for delivery as notifications or alerts according to your required frequency.  These alerts and notifications ensure that you can quickly and proactively address contract activities such as renewals, expirations, approvals, escalations, and contract deliverable fulfillment (e.g., due dates, completion dates, percentage completion, etc.).

Alerts can be configured for time-based events, compliance-based alerts, recurring metrics, user-defined alerts, evaluation and threshold criteria (e.g., expenditure limits, quarterly scorecards and other performance metrics), KPIs, task assignments, and milestone and deliverable notifications and can be based on your business rules and workflow, including customer-specific approval and escalations processes, and configuration of special business and compliance rules.

With ASC’s programmable reporting and searching functionality, users can track all aspects of any form or document and across multiple contracts and document types through notifications, alerts and workflow rules.

Reports, standard and ad hoc, can be configured to send notifications and alerts daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly or on a specific milestone date (e.g., expiration, renewal, deliverable due dates, etc.).

As many recipients as necessary can be added to each notification and the system will automatically alert users that they've been added. Users can also assign attachments to notifications so that whoever needs to make decisions quickly will have the information they need right in hand.

At-A-Glance Report Views: Dashboards, My Lists, Calendars

ASC system reports can be displayed in a variety of at-a-glance formats such as dashboards with graphical representations, worklists (My List), summary screens, calendars, etc., providing instant visual representation of report results in the user’s personalized dashboard view.  Reports can also be created that inject data into simple or highly formatted Excel spreadsheets for additional analytics and calculations. All report formats enable sorting and convenient drilldown to full form and record details.

Report Form Definition

My List

Based on configurable report data, customizable at the user level, My List provides an easy and immediate summary screen to show users their to-do lists of items waiting for review and approval, outstanding tasks/activities, overdue forms or documents requiring signoff, etc.  My Lists are used to simplify the contact process for users by putting important actionable information front and center when they log in to the ASC system.  As an example, when a form or document is routed to a Legal user for approval, they will receive an email notification and the agreement will appear in their My List upon login. The same information can be displayed in dashboards, calendars, Excel, etc. 

My List

Dashboards

Dashboard reports are animated pie, bar and column charts dynamically generated from the real-time report data providing instant visualization of the data results.

Dashboard View

Calendars

Calendars provide a quick personalized view of important dates for action items (expiry, signing, etc.) and provide direct links to related forms and reports so users can take quick action accordingly. Users can export and import calendars from the ASC system to Outlook and Google.

Calendar

Excel Templates and Computations

By leveraging powerful and flexible Excel templates including those with pivot tables and other advance Excel format options as the report presentation tool of choice, virtually an unlimited amount of statistical analysis and trending can be performed. Reports can be scheduled, ad-hoc and extracted. Batch reporting is also an option.

Excel Reporting with Pivot Tables and Charts

Integrates with External Business Intelligence Tools

The ASC system also flexibly integrates with other business intelligence tools, extending the utility of your data. External KPI or business intelligence tools can integrate into the ASC solution in a number of ways (e.g., Web Services API, data dumps, etc.). Enterprise Single Tenant Customers can even access the solution via SQL.  Typically the data is ported into various data structures (e.g., holding tables) in order to facilitate/support the data integration tasks (e.g., one of ASC’s enterprise customers has various holding tables in order to integrate to 32 different interfaces).

Why ASC?

ASC's robust, flexible reporting capability is an integral part of all our web-based, zero footprint solutions.Whatever your business process automation needs, you can trust ASC to deliver tailored online technical solutions that streamline your business operations for improved performance, advanced business intelligence and a better bottom line. Let actionable business data drive your competitive advantage. Schedule a demo of ASC Contracts.

ASC reporting capability enables at-a-glance, actionable business intelligence to drive business performance and relationship management improvements, strategic goal attainment, and increased revenue opportunities.