Obligations can be anything committed to directly or inherently as a result of signing a contract. In some solutions, this may simply take the form of some configuration on the page layout of the agreement record which helps to drive dynamic clause selection, whereas in other contracting processes it can be less concrete than that. There are two methods of approaching obligation management in a CLM solution:
1. Users configure fields on the agreement (or parent) record such as a payment terms picklist (15, 30, 45-day options for example) or a checkbox (which when checked will drive Conga Orchestrate to add in an arbitration clause for example). These are pre-signature obligation management actions which can be reported on by reporting on these data elements on the agreement.
2. For a more robust obligation management strategy, an obligation object can be created with a few simple fields such as Obligation Type (picklist with options), Obligation Commitment (picklist with values depicting for how long an obligation is active. For example: lifetime of the contract, perpetuity, first six months of the contract, etc.), Obligation Expiration. Then, using Conga Orchestrate's drill-down operator capabilities, a definition with associated steps can be configured to evaluate the makeup of the managed clauses and in the presence of specific managed clauses, obligation records can be created and fields defined as a child of the agreement object. This results in a related list of obligations and their timelines for reportability.
For extra impact, a grid view can be added to the Contracts HUB. For more information on this process, see Conga Grid Quick Start Options.
