Contract Management
Even the best contracts are of little use if nobody is familiar with them. It often happens, especially in the larger conglomerates, that one group company enters into a contract without anyone in the rest of the group knowing anything about it. Contract management aims to create transparency and consolidate existing contracts. Result: better terms for all internal customers.
There are a number of basic rules that need to be observed:
A contract needs to apply to all. It should include a clause making the terms of the contract available to all the group companies.
A contract needs to be easily accessible. The intranet is an optimum solution as it allows contracts to be accessed from all sites of the corporate group.
The product users / internal users of third-party services need to be informed of the new contract location. This may seem to be stating the obvious, but contract management of this kind is often implemented centrally, and although head office is happy, the whole system fails to work because no one else knows about it. A broad-based information policy fills the gap.
The product users / internal users of third-party services need to be able to work easily with the intranet solution. This can mean having the ability to gain access without a lot of red tape, or being adequately trained to navigate the system.
The implemented system should be user friendly—it is not enough to simply file master agreements centrally. The system also needs to offer search functions and include an automatic notification of updates.
Feedback should be possible: When procurement staff start using the system and the master agreements on a large scale, they need to have the option of giving feedback and suggesting improvements without encountering red tape. Otherwise the system will never really be accepted by product users / internal users of third-party services.