外文资料原文

A Web-based and Email Driven Electronic Contract Management

System

Thomas Kwok, Thao Nguyen, Linh Lam and Trieu Chieu

IBM Research Division

Thomas J. Watson Research Center

19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, NY 10532

***********.com

1. Introduction

Contracts are required in most transactions of the enterprise business, as they constitute the binding relationship between an enterprise and its suppliers, business partners, or customers. In many enterprises, the majority of their revenues are contract driven. At the same, a significant part of their expenses is also contract related. Automation of some contract management tasks in the electronic contract lifecycle presents a substantial value creation opportunity for the enterprise. This value stems from improved productivity and security, effectively aggregated contract information, accelerated contract transaction time and lifecycle processes, reduced contractual errors and risk, enabled revenue forecast and profit optimization, as well as better compliance enforcement.

With the advent of Internet technology and electronic commerce, there are growing research activities and implementation efforts on establishing and standardizing an electronic contract management system.

Currently, the International Association of Contract and Commercial Managers have listed over twenty commercial available software products for electronic contract management. Most research activities on the electronic contract reported are focus on electronic contract creation or representation language, management, negotiation and collaboration, execution, performance, security and signing, fulfillment and data mining. However, there is no study or product focus on a Web-based electronic contract management system that can support both internal and intra-enterprises workflows, or with multi-tenants hosting capability. There are some discussions in addressing the need to execute electronic contracts in a speedy way but there is no good method proposed. In addition, there is no good disclosed method to automate the watermarking of signature information on the signed electronic contracts although there are several automated electronic contract creation and process methods reported.

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 sends out email notifications to request those users who are required to act on certain tasks to process their electronic contracts to act on their tasks immediately at every internal business process and document flow step within every workflow. For sequential tasks, this system also sends out email notifications to those users in line to act on the next task to process their electronic contracts to alert and remind them to take actions when other users have just completed the previous tasks. Thus, this system enables the electronic contract users to accelerate the transaction time and life cycle of their electronic contracts. 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.