Correctly managing contracts is an integral part of business success and is crucial to creating sustainable outcomes and relationships. Here are five further tips on contract management, focussing on post-contractual monitoring:
1. Draw on your counterparty’s expertise
You have carefully selected your supplier, which probably means they have considerable expertise in their field. See what you can learn from them to help make your processes more efficient. The most successful business relationships are built on knowledge sharing and usually make both parties better off.
2. Monitor your counterparty’s performance
Key performance indicators should be monitored from all the key stakeholders in your organisation who interface with the counterparty. This information will be useful in your next negotiation in addition to potentially providing feedback to the counterparty at the right juncture.
3. Prioritise your resources on the most important contracts
In an age in which there is a plethora of information at your fingertips, prioritisation is critical to your efficiency. This is no different when it comes to the time you spend monitoring contract performance. Be sure not to get bogged down with unimportant contracts, instead focussing the majority of your time where it matters the most. This could mean that you check performance metrics for less-important contracts less frequently, or you could check all contracts equally frequently if you have the discipline to spend less time on certain contracts.
4. Organise your contract information efficiently and securely
Related to tip three, you will be significantly more efficient if you can organise information efficiently. The information you need should be easily and intuitively accessible to you and anyone else in your organisation with the requisite authority to access the information and documentation. Given the importance of the contractual information in question, no compromise can be made to the safeguards put in place, both for the benefit of your organisation and your counterparty’s. A well-designed contract management system from a specialist such as https://www.contractswise.com/ will help you to achieve this, and your other contract management needs, in one easy-to-use platform.
5. Report contract performance to senior management
Make sure you have an easily digestible and easily reproducible reporting template that can be given to senior management whenever requested. Monitoring your contracts is not an end in itself – the information needs to be used to make recommendations to your colleagues.