A secure electronic contract management and process system automated with predefined tasks

Abstract

Electronic contract management and process usually involved a large number of complex manual steps. These manual steps are often tedious and may cause security faults. In this paper, we present an efficient electronic contract management and process system automated with predefined tasks in a secure environment. It comprises an application server, at least one administrator module and many individual user modules. It involves a user-specific setup file of encoded security, task and document parameters generated by an administrator to authorize a user to perform a set of predefined tasks on a selected group of electronic contract documents. It also consists of a configure file generator for the user to select and configure authorized tasks from a set of predefined task modules of execution instructions. Then, its execution engine carries these instructions automatically in a secure environment based on the user's configuration file. Thus, this automation system substantially improves the efficiency, and at the same time eliminates the potential for human error and security breaches in the performance of electronic contract management and task process. © 2005 IEEE.