The contract management space has gone through a great turn of events over the past few years. Apart from the typical contract lifecycle management (CLM) challenges, a lack of transparency on claims, irregular usage of standardized terms and legal language, and decentralized storage methods have all been raging issues plaguing the contract management space. For organizations, it is not only a matter of running the risk of falling behind the fierce competition, but also the case of compromising on the security, integrity, and accessibility of the contract. The need of the hour for organizations is to do away with outdated/stale methods and solutions and start adapting to advanced and all-encompassing solutions. One such provider is Princeton, New Jersey-based CobbleStone Software.

Why CobbleStone®?

Founded in 1995 by Mark Nastasi, CobbleStone has been offering state-of-the-art contract management systems with a mission to deliver the most advanced, cost-effective, and user-friendly contract and procurement management software applications that enable employees to do their best work. From the words of Mark, CobbleStone Software has stayed true in its mission to exceed the expectations of its clients by delivering the best-of-breed products that continue to evolve to meet clients’ changing needs through continuous growth and innovation. The firm has also been exemplary in showcasing its integrity towards its loyal client base by taking the pledge to respect and understand the needs of its clients by striving to deliver on its core values of utmost sincerity, humility, courtesy, and wisdom when catering to its clients.

“Our mission was created to help organizations avoid violations of agreements while providing a better solution to manage contracts and obligations”, says Mark. Since then, the firm has lent its ardent focus to expanding on areas that have been the most challenging for its clients. The firm’s flagship offering, CobbleStone Contract Insight® is one-of-a-kind scalable enterprise contract management software that helps streamline the contract lifecycle management process from beginning to end. Through a user-friendly interface, the software leverages out-of-the-box features for contract data field tracking, key date alerts, risk management, contract drafting, contract review, and industry-specific contract type tracking. Organizations can thus integrate their internal processes seamlessly with other mission-critical applications and help ensure ease of use, smooth transitions with high adoption rates, and rapid time-to-value.

A Multi-Faceted Solution

Designed to adapt across all industries of varied sizes, CobbleStone Contract Insight can be hosted on the cloud or deployed on-premise. The software offers a plethora of advanced features including intelligent workflow automation, a contract repository that is secure and easily searchable, ad hoc and custom contract management reports, system dashboards, and calendars for enhanced visibility. To enable and attain clarity and security on contracts, CobbleStone Contract Insight offers intelligent contract term, clause, and data extraction and classification, robust protection of sensitive data, comprehensive assessment of employee accountability, and usage of contract artificial intelligence tools along with advanced risk assessment and compliance tools that include OFAC search compliance.

Along with being a contract lifecycle management solution, the software is also a vendor and e-procurement management solution and is thus a multi-faceted offering that provides contract management tools built upon a foundation of contract AI and machine learning. “We are constantly evolving our contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution, and we are dedicated to releasing multiple system updates per year to refresh our user interface and our tools to meet industry demands”, says Mark. CobbleStone’s VISDOM® a powerful contract management tool backed by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) systematically analyses contracts originated by internal or external paper to transform the documents into building blocks for improved contract oversight, proactive opportunity realization, and risk mitigation.

CobbleStone Software has designed its flagship offering around various industry verticals including government, healthcare, legal, pharma/life sciences, education, finance, energy/utilities, and many other prominent industries. Because of this varied applicability, the firm has designed its CLM software to be extremely flexible and configurable according to a vast array of industry needs. “We seek to consistently provide learning opportunities for new and current clients on a regular basis. By hosting user conferences, masterclasses, online group training, integrations and connectors, worldwide data centers, and educational webinars, we aim for users to experience the full benefits of CobbleStone Contract Insight”, says Mark.

Keeping Pace with Time

In terms of leveraging the relevant technology trends, CobbleStone leaves no stone unturned to satiate its clients’ needs and preferences. For this very reason the firm has partnered with the bigwigs in the field of technology, including Microsoft, HubSpot, and many other giants to best enable its clients.

“Many of our clients prefer our web-enabled SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) hosting option. We do also offer locally deployed hosting. We are acclaimed for our low-friction and convenient integrations and connectors.”

To best serve the interest of its clients, CobbleStone has classified its offering, CobbleStone Contract Insight for both large and small enterprises. CobbleStone offers 3 versions of CobbleStone Contract Insight with a variety of features offered in each allowing organizations to choose the one that fits their unique needs. The solution is scalable and evolves with organizations’ growth.

CobbleStone Contract Insight Enterprise Edition provides an end-to-end enterprise-level, user-friendly, and web-enabled contract management system with in-demand features.

CobbleStone Contract Insight Express Edition is an end-to-end entry-level, SaaS contract management system that delivers the features and functionality organizations require with a seamless migration path for expanded features and functionality.

CobbleStone Contract Insight WorkGroup Edition is a cost-effective, on-premise (deployed) contract management system that delivers the features and functionality organizations need to get started for better contract management. This edition is available as a deployed solution on-premise or on an organization’s corporate cloud.

“We aim to consistently offer features and tools that are industry-leading and ultimately helpful for users in contract management. Recently, we have rolled out CobbleStone Auto-Redline – a feature that is powered by VISDOM artificial intelligence with machine learning.

CobbleStone Auto-Redline provides users with the ability to streamline contract processes as well as automate the inclusion of clauses from their approved clause library. As such, organizations can virtually ensure that favorable clause language is included in contracts. The ability to automate the redlining process is part of what makes CobbleStone a key differentiator.”

Future Steps

CobbleStone is paving the digital way, and is keen on exploring more opportunities to leverage artificial intelligence to enhance its prowess in the contract lifecycle management space. Currently, CobbleStone is leveraging many features under VISDOM powered by AI and ML. Through IntelliXtract™, the solution bestows its users with the power to look into contracts and agreements to find key terms, legal phrases, conditions, and other legal text. The Theory Calculator another feature under VISDOM provides users with recurring automated data analyses and on-screen recommendations to provide helpful guidance throughout the contract administration process.

Going forward, CobbleStone strives to go above and beyond industry standards by consistently providing users with supportive features and tools to help with their contract management processes. The firm is currently working on a 1,000,000 contract clause project to feed real-life clauses of ranging types into its proprietary VISDOM AI, with over 700,000 contract clauses already fed.