1. What is Contract Advantage Web?

Contract Advantage Web (CA WEB) is a Web browser-based contract management system that can be installed behind your firewall or hosted on our servers. CA WEB is an easy-to-use solution for the management of time, people and financial resources corresponding to contract-related activities - whether it be pre-contract, in negotiation, during the life of the Contract or contract close-out. The system offers many modules in support of Contract Management process-date management, early warning action alerts via Email; tracking of compliance, insurance certificates, intellectual property, real estate, financial transactions; and Contract generation, document templates, and much more.

Contract Advantage Web is flexible. It allows you to effectively create new contracts or abstract existing contracts and store information so that it can be sorted, selected and reported in a way meaningful to your organization. In addition to the standard information that you can track, the system permits you to rename fields, display pages and fields at will, and create custom pages and fields should you require them. In addition to the ample supply of reports available, you can export every grid in the system to Excel and create your own reports. User-defined reports can be private or made available for use by all.

The fact that you are here, tells us that you already know why, but because this product in particular offers you the flexibility of customizing your contract management to meet your specific needs. Information needs to be shared, but only to personnel authorized. Automatic alerts are needed to remind stakeholders about what they need to do. You may need to create contract documents, generate reports, do a full text search of your imaged documents. You have compliance issues, Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA or other requirements, and vendor and/or client monitoring needs, etc.

Contract Advantage Web is useful in the following areas: legal and contract administration, purchasing, financial controls and administration, marketing and sales, R&D contracting, clinical trials, physician management, engineering and information systems management. CA WEB has been designed to provide the user with quick answers to typical management questions, such as:

- What contract actions are imminent, when are they due, and who is responsible?
- When is the contract expiring and do you want it to expire?
- How can we prevent contracts from renewing when they are not profitable?
- Where is all the info relating to a contract that may currently kept in a dozen different places?
- Who is responsible for which agreements?
- Who are the key outside contacts and how can I reach them?
- What relationships do we have with outside third parties/vendors?
- What are our financial obligations and anticipated receipts tied to a contract?
- and more...

CAWEB has been designed for:
- Flexibility: Searching hundreds of fields of data stored in the system's database. The system logic has been designed to allow for searches from a combination of fields included in the search.
- Flexibility: Reporting on the core information in the system, as well as action reports and contract reports. You can define reports based on groups of contracts/agreements that meet your search parameters.
- Flexibility: Permitting users to set the system up and track information that is appropriate to your line of business.

You can retrieve all Contracts that meet whatever search parameters are set on the Selection Screen. There are over 200 fields that you can search on individually or in combination. You decide. You can also save your query and run it again at a later date. You can also run a full-text search against stored files and document images (PDF files with OCR layers).

If you ask any client, the following features are the most important:

1- There is THE central repository of contract information and documents.
2- Accountability of persons responsible for contracts and related actions.
3- Reminders to these responsible people of what they have to do in a timely manner.
4- Templates to facilitate constructing contracts.
5- The Clause Library for sourcing preferred and alternate language for contracts.
6- Data import and export capabilities.
7- Workflow to expedite contract approvals.
8- Vast reporting.
9- Flexibility, Flexibility, and Flexibility.
Whatever your needs, there are modules that offer functionality that will meet your needs.

A wide variety of reports are available, including many contract-based reports in summary and detail, contact lists and labels, client lists and labels, management and system statistics, intellectual property, action-based reports, and much more. You can also export reports to Excel, create custom grids and export to Excel, and create custom reports that can be private or made public.

GMS believes in providing utmost flexibility in our systems. We update CA WEB and its reporting on a regular basis with input from our customers. In addition, CA WEB uses Microsoft SQL Server, a standard open architecture database that allows reporting through Microsoft Access, Crystal Reports or other mechanisms. Any grid in the system can be exported to Excel. You can create custom reports that can be private or made public. Any table in the system can be exported in part or in whole to Excel or XML.

CA WEB can be run on one server, or spread across multiple servers for control, security and load balancing. This means that the Web Server, Application Server and Database Server can actually be run on the same physical server or run on separate servers, as required. Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (and soon 2009) is the recommended server operating system platform, with 2GB of main memory, and a RAID-5 or mirrored storage system (50-100GB usable, at minimum). The system runs under Internet Explorer 6 or 7, and IIS web server Version 6. The system runs under .NET Framework 3.5. The workstation O/S support includes Windows XP and Vista (32- or 64-bit).

CA WEB was created using Microsoft Visual Studio ASP.NET 2009 for the front end development and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 (and 2009) for the backend database.

CA WEB is offered and priced on a concurrent or named user basis. If purchased as a concurrent-user system, this means that it will allow a set number of simultaneous users on the system at the same time. For example, a 5-user pack will allow for 5 users logged into the system at one time. However, 20 people could have rights to log into the system. There is a price difference depending on the specific license model selected.

We release major new versions every 2 years, on average, and several interim releases in between.

Your account representative can provide you with current sample pricing and/or a firm price quote if appropriate.

GMS offers a maintenance agreement designed to provide the user with ongoing, unlimited direct access to GMS technical support, client support consultants, as well as ongoing updates, upgrades and releases to the core product. Support pricing is based on a term agreement--20% of the list price license fee on a three-year term, is an example.

CA WEB has the ability to store as many documents as you would like within each contract record. This may be any type of file, including scanned images. If scanned images are stored with a text layer, they then become full-text searchable.

This is a highly customizable solution "out of the box." CA WEB includes many modules and fields. You decide which modules to activate when. You name the fields and populate the menu choices to suite your needs. You decide what to track with CA WEB, not the other way around!

The extra work depends on what you need to accomplish. We can automate loading of legacy documents, write custom links to interface with your other systems, etc. Usually, you will also be doing far more than you ever did before-but you will also have more people involved, more ways to spread out the workload and more that will be automated. CA WEB is your key to effectively managing your contracts and resources.

CA WEB allows you to search upon any combination of hundreds of fields, all of which are user definable. Once you have the results of your query, you may print the grid; export it to Excel; or run any of the over 100 reports that are built into CA WEB; or use the user-defined reporting capability. You may then export the reports into Word, Excel, or PDF. Any table in the system can also be exported to Excel or XML in whole or in part.

In addition to the Key Dates, users may set up unlimited, user-defined, one-time or recurring actions within each contract record (i.e. renewal, payment, reporting, and term). Actions are completely user defined. The highly flexible action reports within CA WEB will ensure that no actions are ever overlooked.

CA WEB provides a very robust, multi-layered security system. Users are given roles and placed in groups. The groups are assigned rights to modules and functions. To access contracts, for instance, the user must be in a group that has correct rights to the company involved, contract type and Security Level combination. Access rights can include Add, Edit, Delete, and/or just View Only rights.

Yes. When a user logs into CA WEB, he/she can only access the records and modules that fit his/her security profile. Thus, the user will never see or report on contracts that they do not have access to.

Yes. In the US, Customer support is 9AM to 5PM Eastern Standard Time. We have an international support center that covers the balance of 24 hour x 5 day coverage.

Installation usually takes place within two to four weeks. This depends on Installer availability and any hardware or software the client must have in place prior to installation. The technical setup and site configuration is scheduled for a 3-4 day effort; it may be longer depending on the specific services to be provided. For hosted sites that will not be maintaining the database, setup is usually completed within 24 hours of receipt of payment. Training is scheduled for immediately after installation depending on Trainer availability-usually within two weeks after installation. Training duration will depend on which product is purchased. The training regimen for a WebElite installation, for example, is a full 5 days. You will have the ability to go live immediately after Training takes place.