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Contract management that can keep pace in the 5G era

Contract management that can keep pace in the 5G era

In the 5G era, everything needs to move faster: time to market, service design and deployment, issue resolution — and the contracting process, too. As a communications service provider (CSP), once you’ve chosen a network vendor to help drive your 5G rollout, the last thing you want is to wait on the sidelines for the contract to be finalized while your competitors forge ahead.

That said, it’s still important to get things right. Telecoms contracts are complex, multi-year, multi-million-dollar agreements. Building one can be as complex a task as running the network itself! And that’s why transparency matters just as much as speed. A good contracting process should lay out the scope of the work, the associated risks, and the roles and responsibilities of everyone involved. It sets the tone for a healthy business relationship over the years to come.

Quality is also critical. Contracts must be done right the first time, reflecting a precise and accurate understanding of what is to be delivered to avoid costly mistakes or delays down the road.

So how are we at Nokia achieving all three of these characteristics? By taking a digitalized, automated and intelligent approach to commercial contracting.

Meeting your needs for speed, transparency and quality

Our new Contract Management Framework (CMF) is a first-of-its-kind, cloud-based contracting platform that brings greater speed, transparency and quality to all the contracts we prepare.

Using artificial intelligence (AI), digital dashboards and an entirely new contracting methodology, the CMF has reduced the time and effort required to assess and evaluate contracts by 25 percent, shortening contract negotiations and speeding up the entire contracting lifecycle.

Here’s how:

  • We built the CMF to work at 5G speed. The platform makes it easy to analyze contract-related data at scale by replacing formerly manual effort across disparate teams with an AI-driven solution that’s automatically updated with input from across our company. This lets our sales and contracting teams work more quickly, closing deals faster so you can get your 5G services to market sooner.
  • Our contract management team works closely with you to identify your needs and understand your pain points, allowing us to focus on the issues that matter most while bringing increased transparency into the contracting process about potential business risks and impacts.
  • The CMF brings together the knowledge and skills of a multidisciplinary team — with representation from sales, process, digital tooling, sales and contract management — to ensure your contract meets your demands for quality and accuracy in a complex 5G environment.

Twitter award

An award-winning approach

Those are just a few of the advantages being delivered by our new contract management platform. With increased transparency across our entire body of contracts, we can analyze each one in greater depth and detail, so our executives can make better decisions. AI is yielding new insights into contract trends. And our use of the cloud helps us better allocate our human resources to more high-value work.

With the way it increases speed, transparency and quality, our new approach to commercial contract management is already being noticed on the world stage. This year, in a field filled with Fortune 500 companies, the World Commerce and Contracting Association (IACCM) awarded Nokia its 2020 Strategic Direction Innovation and Excellence Award. And we’re just getting started. As we move more quickly toward realizing the promise of 5G, we will continue to innovate across all areas of our business, so you can keep pace and realize that promise more quickly as well.
 

Chandan Chatterjee

About Chandan Chatterjee

Chandan is Nokia’s Head of Sales for the Global Services business group. He is a British Chevening Scholar and holds a Master’s degree in International Business and a Bachelor of Engineering. At present, Chandan focuses on Strategic customer engagement to drive Nokia’s 5G services and growth of professional services. In his last 25 years in Nokia, he held many positions driving win-win customer engagements in sales, marketing, business planning, and strategy across various geographies and portfolios. Chandan mentors early-stage startups. He is an outdoors person and a regular sportsman, and in his spare time also enjoys cooking and listening to music.

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