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Contract Risk Management

What is at risk?

There was a time when all of an organisation's contracts could be centrally scrutinised before signing.  This allowed for high-levels of consistency and control.  But in today's multi-national fast moving companies the idea of all contracts going to a single central human resource for processing is just not viable.  Sales deadlines, production deadlines and the ever present stockholder pressure for growth mean that time is very much of the essence.

So we have the situation where in reality contracts are being negotiated and signed at many different levels within the organisation, and often in different legal juristictions.  There may well be documented procedures that cover this, but they are not always adhered to rigorously ...or even at all. The result is that many organisations have lost control of their Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) and cannot be sure of what contracts exist, under what terms and where the original copies are held.

And this isn't just in the realm of the inept ... it is a daily situation facing many very well known corporations around the world.

The benefits of taking action

Gaining control of the Contract Lifecycle allows organisations to coordinate resources to negotiate better terms, track and plan for their own exposure to contractual obligations, police variations from the defined obligations by other parties, and to manage the end-of-life or renewal of contracts as appropriate. 

This will significantly reduce the risk that the organisation faces from the total of all of its contracts as well as providing essential managerial visibility of status, progress and potential issues.

Eliminating Contract Management risk

d2OPS international can assist organisations in eliminating the substantial risk in Contract Lifecycle Management through a systems based approach that both protects the business as well as allowing commercial flexibility to meet market needs.

Our approach starts with an audit programme to establish a realistic assessment of the scale of the problem, the areas of weakness, and where increased flexibility is required.  Employee 'workarounds' are uncovered and documented as are bottlenecks and inflexibilities in the formal contractual system.

Once the assessment is complete an extended workshop is run to define a business rules-based approach that will accomodate the different operational needs across the different levels of the business set against the central need for visibility and accountability.  This workshop may run in stages over a period of weeks if neccessary.

With the business rules defined, d2OPS international will work with the client to implement these rules into IT systems, either pre-existing or newly acquired.  Part of this process is the establishment of a central 'contract vault' where electronic copies (including scanned copies of paper contracts) are automatically stored.  This vault provides the core visibility that the organisation needs as well as providing document authenticity which is important for Electronically Stored Information (ESI) management and possible Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) litigation.