1. What is Contract Advantage Web?

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

Contract Advantage Web allows you to effectively create new contracts or abstract existing contracts and store information so that it can be sorted, selected and reported. Some of the important information that you can track includes contract name, number, title, parties, counsel, contacts, agreement/termination dates, review/renewal dates, territories, trademarks and patents, leases, transactions, obligations and provisions, contract field descriptors, and any other actions that are relevant to Contract. The user has full capabilities for adding or changing contract types, action types, and action frequencies, contract fields and titles-actually, each contract record can be "sculpted" to display only those contract system pages and fields that are relevant to that type of contract. Add pages, add fields, create your own reports, export grids to Excel, etc.

If you are here, you already know why. You have a large contract base. It is complicated. Information needs to be shared. Automatic alerts are needed to inform 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 requirements, vendor and client monitoring needs, etc.

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

- What contract actions are imminent and when are they due?  Who is responsible?
- When is the contract expiring?
- How can we prevent contracts from renewing unnecessarily?
- Where is all the info relating to a contract that is kept in a dozen different places?
- Who is responsible for which agreements?
- Who are the key 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:
- flexible 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.
- flexible 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 criteria.
- complete contract management, utilizing the 400+ fields of data the system is capable of storing.

You can retrieve all Contracts that meet whatever search criteria is set on the Search screen. For instance, you can access all contracts involved with patent #1234-5678. Or, for that patent number, all contracts expiring between 7/1/2008 and 12/31/2008. Or, for those same contracts, Contracts that are under litigation. Or, you can pull up all contracts under litigation. There are 100's of data fields that you can use, in combination or alone, to select contracts. Other uses of this could include: show me all vendor contracts, across all divisions, for a particular vendor; show me all agreements related to a particular individual (i.e., product manager) or represented by a particular in-house counsel; show me all distribution agreements covering Abu Dhabi. You can also run a full-text search against stored document images (PDF files with OCR layers).

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

1- the system becomes THE central repository of contract information and documents
2- the system tracks who is responsible for contracts and related actions
3- the system reminds these responsible people of what they have to do in a timely manner
4- the system provides templates for constructing contracts
5- the system provides a clause library for sourcing preferred and alternate language for contracts
6- the system provides data import and export facilities
7- the system enables integration with external ERP and custom systems and databases
8- the system offers workflow capabilities for contract approvals
9- the system provides a flexible reporting environment
Whatever your needs, there are key modules that offer services that can meet your needs.

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

The GMS believes in providing utmost flexibility in our systems. We update CAWEB and its reporting on a regular basis, with input from our customers. In addition, CAWEB uses Microsoft SL Server, a standard open architecture database that allows reporting through Microsoft Access, Crystal Reports or other mechanisms.

CAWEB 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. Microsoft Windows Server 2003 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 requires Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher, and IIS web server Version 6 or higher. The system is requires ASP.NET Framework 1.1.

CAWEB was created using Microsoft Visual Studio ASP.NET 2003 for the front end development and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 (and 2005 coming in 2007) for the backend database.

CAWEB has been designed and priced on a concurrent or named user basis. 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 1½ -2 years, on average, and several interim releases in between.

The FULL Web Product pricing starts at US$18,500 for a 5-Named User system and $30,000 for a 5-Concurrent User system. There is a "lite" version also available starting at $12,500.

What if I need technical support? 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 upgrades and releases to the core product. Support pricing is based on roughly 20% of the list price license fee.

CAWEB has the ability to link as many documents as you would like from 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.

CAWEB includes many modules and fields. You may populate the pull-down menu choices on your own. This is a highly customizable solution "out of the box". You decide what to track with CAWEB, not the other way around!

The extra work depends on what you need to accomplish. We can automate loading of legacy documents, interfacing with your ERP 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. So, it should not dissuade you from doing what must be done. CAWEB is your key to effectively managing your contracts and resources.

CAWEB 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 100 pre-built reports that are built into CAWEB, or use the user defined reporting capability. You may then export the reports into Word, Excel, Access, HTML and Crystal Reports.

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

CAWEB provides a very robust 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, contract type and security level combination. Users can belong to multiple groups, and access rights can include Add, Edit, Delete and View rights.

Yes. When a user logs into CAWEB, he can only access the records that fit their security profile. Thus, the user will never see 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 a 24 hour x 5 day coverage.

The technical setup and site configuration is scheduled for a 3-day effort; it may be longer depending on the specific services to be provided. The full training regimen for a standard installation is a full 5 days. For hosted sites that will not be maintaining the database, setup is usually completed within 24 hours from placing the order, and training is planned for a 3-day in-depth session.