Ironclad, from the company of the same name in San Francisco, is designed to streamline every part of the contract process—so users can focus on legal work, not paperwork.
If you have a highly bureaucratic organization that is heavily focused on procurement, Emptoris can provide some value. It seemed to be very good at linking the contract information to procurement for better spend control. If you are trying to implement a standalone contract management solution that allows you to easily create contracts and store them in a central location, this isn't the tool for you. There doesn't appear to be a simplified implementation. In general, when a SaaS solution has a complicated and expensive implementation, I am very skeptical. This does not show that the vendor is trying to move customers forward on a single code base. If that many things need to be done during implementation, you are starting to customize the solution for every customer. This hurts the vendor's ability to scale and make improvements in the future.
IronClad works great for organizations that have to deal with a lot of legal agreements at the same time, it works great for having a legal team reviewing and modifying the same legal document in a single place, and the comments in the workflow, and the approval functionality allows keeping track of the changes and assign accountability.
Document protection - the Check Out contract feature is a great way to allow external parties to make modifications to contract language without the ability to accept those changes. Those redlines can then be imported back into Emptoris and reviewed or further modified as needed.
Notifications & reminders - you can trigger an email manually from within the system, or you can configure automated notifications andreminders to alert users when a new task is received or has aged a given amount of days, etc.
Interview wizard - there is a lot of value in the interview wizard. Administrators can configure screens with selecting options via check boxes, radio buttons, or typed-in values. Variables and conditions can be used to selectively populate fields within the contract or apply other options, making for a quick and convenient method to generate contracts conforming to corporate standards.
Field customization - administrators can customize a list of options for various fields including contract substatus, address type, and user created business term variables.
Approvals - many different options are available to configure approvals to trigger automatically upon presenting and/or executing the contract including specific individuals, one or more approver groups, or based upon various criteria including terms within the contract, type of contract, or the contract's owning organization.
Reporting, Emptoris comes with standard reports which can not always can be fit into our business. This needs to be improved. I hope Emptoris is addressing this issue in their latest releases.
Though the feature of editing language in MS word is excellent, loading MS word takes time.
Once you add someone into a workflow there is no way to remove them. It would be nice to be able to get out of a workflow or remove someone.
The "assignment" function could be more clear for those individuals who don't regularly use Ironclad. Perhaps prompting them on how to upload a signed agreement if they are not the owner of the workflow.
There are a lot of new, exciting products coming out in every field and I believe that there is always something better right over the horizon. If it was my choice, I would review my usage of Emptoris and other software periodically to make sure I'm using the most efficient software possible.
The platform works great, the user interface is simple and clean, and very intuitive to use. Having different sections for completed or in progress workflows is really helpful, but I wish the title given to the different workflows could be easily modified in order to better identify the legal documents and workflows that are being developed with our different partners
The above rating for the overall support from Emptoris is for their product / product support, roll out training and refresher training / ongoing training, which is not only good but superior. There is no major or reconizable bad review that can be given to Emptoris at this point in time, from where is stands.
The Ironclad support team is very knowledgable and supportive to implement workflows, and also they also understand new features and releases. We could discuss how we should use considering future use.
I am a fan of Ariba to be used for the entire lifecycle of Sourcing. From RFX's to cutting PO's. I feel Emptoris misses the boat on the idea of a "One Stop Shop" for all of your Sourcing/Purchasing needs
IronClad is a comprehensive platform that allows legal teams, cross functional teams and approvers to keep track of the suggestions and changes made to legal agreements. It keeps everything in a single place, however it lacks the simplicity and practicality of DocuSign throughout the signing process, so we usually have to use both platforms to complete a legal workforce
We won the 2005 Baseline Magazine Award for best ROI related to a technology implementation with an ROI 5544% (see 2005 Baseline ROI Awards, GlaxoSmithkline).
We always felt we could do "two times the work, with half the people and deliver double the savings".
Positive - Increased efficiency, as all work into the legal department flows into Ironclad. We can see where resources are being spent and which internal business partners are utilizing the legal department the most.
Positing - Better internal business partner service. We are able to communicate directly with our internal partners as to the status of their request and keep them apprised where we are in the negotiation process, etc.
