Category Archives: Contract Management
Perhaps your organization has a contract already in place with a service provider, and you are thinking those pre-negotiated contract terms and conditions might save you time and money in sourcing the next area of your business. Or perhaps your organization decides that skipping a competitive process and sourcing directly with one service provider will be more efficient. Of course, sole-sourced contracts can be successful, but these Top 5 suggestions remind us that a competitive solicitation process delivers increased knowledge … More
Despite the challenging circumstances of today’s economic environment, you must embrace change in order to support shifting external environments and business strategies. At the same time, you look for opportunities to capitalize on disruptive changes in supply markets, which can drive greater value for your organization. You must become a purchasing hero. What is a purchasing hero? We believe a purchasing hero brings knowledge capital to multiple departments. They inspire collaboration and cross-coordinate with as many internal stakeholders as possible. … More
Contract management is an important aspect of managing supplier relationships and ensuring that commodities and services are negotiated at the right time. Unfortunately contracts are often managed poorly within a company. Even a smaller company can have hundreds of active agreements, adding up to thousands of contract terms and clauses. As you may know, not one of those contract terms carries much weight if the agreement isn’t monitored and enforced. Procurement Managers know that getting a fair price on goods … More
As you and your team are preparing to execute your Procurement strategy for 2013, consider adding these resolutions to your “to-do” list: 1. Tell your sourcing story. Has your team transformed processes or implemented new technologies that blew the socks off senior management? Tell everyone by sharing your sourcing stories. Consider creating a quarterly (or monthly) newsletter or e-mail to distribute to the entire company so you can publicize your successes and impact on the organization’s growth and bottom line. … More
If your company doesn’t have a good contract management process in place then you are missing out on some significant opportunities to improve your procurement processes, maximize negotiated savings, minimize off-contract spend, and leverage your full buying potential to get the best possible pricing from suppliers. How do you know if you need a better contract management process? Ask yourself these 10 questions and, if you answer yes to more than one or two, you should take a serious look … More
In Part 1, I covered Spend Matter’s first idea to enhance procurement’s value to the business. Click here to read Part 1. The second idea to deliver new value to the business is to connect sourcing activity to contracts- implement savings faster and manage compliance. “Contact management is one of these things in the past five years that’s hung outside of procurement,” Busch said. “But we are seeing a newfound focus to use contract management to drive implemented savings.” Procurement … More
Iasta has been long at work researching trends and best practices in contract authoring because we’ve received a lot of requests to provide authoring to go along with SmartContracts®, our contract management software. The first obstacle we uncovered seemed to be an almost universal challenge: standardizing contract language. Many companies, regardless of size or industry, struggle to implement standard, approved language in all their contracts. The inclusion of non-standard language is a primary reason for contract rejection during the contract … More
