Our contract management services focus on helping clients to get the right balance in their key supplier relationships. Typically, these services will focus on the following areas:
Contract Management Services
Contract Management Services
When it comes to contracts, there is a tendency to blow the dust off them only when things start to go wrong. A key tenet of contract management is preventing risk long before it gathers the momentum to bite. Every contract has a value attached to it in the form of products or services supplied. Robust contract management ensures the value of products and services purchased is properly attained, and clamps down on ‘you get what you’re given’ scenarios where the threat of this emerges.
‘Creep’ is the silent killer of contracts. It is all too common as commissioned work progresses for costs to creep up, delays to creep in, and scope of work to creep outwards. In isolation each is damaging, together they make for a most unholy trinity. Robust contract management detects the early signs of ‘creep’, and halts its progress before any damage can be done, thus ensuring business benefits are realised, and client obligations are delivered.
Compliance regulations exist to ensure businesses are acting responsibly towards their staff, customers, suppliers, and the environment. They are important, backed up by legislation, and falling foul of them can have dire consequences. The bigger and more complex a contract, the more difficult it becomes to remain compliant. Deploying contract management professionals then, is by far the most effective means of protecting your business from profit-annihilating fines. Indeed, American technology and services company, Aberdeen Group discovered that compliance is improved 55% with a contract management system in place.
The fact that the procurement industry exists, a major component of which is contract management, demonstrates how much time and expertise it requires. A company can look to manage its own contracts, but every employee who is selected for this role is not working to acquire new business, and/or engage in other mission critical endeavours. Outsourcing contract management to dedicated professionals, allows every member of your workforce to focus their energies on growing the business.
In this hyper-competitive, contemporary business world, reputations have never been so difficult to establish, and so easy to destroy. A contract that goes wrong can have consequences that reach far beyond the companies immediately involved. Not only is your name muddied with them, but with everyone they share their experience with.
There are many solutions out there, ranging from expensive and often clunky solutions that are native to your corporate Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, to stand-alone cloud services that appear cost-effective but don’t join up to the broader eco-system of applications and corporate reporting. Our approach to contract management starts with understanding what your team are actually willing to use day in day out and the incremental value that can derived be enhancing your capability and capacity to manage your suppliers’ contracts. The solution is something that fits your ways of working, not something which requires you to change everything to comply with clunky functionality in massive corporate systems. Flexible solutions can be developed from our existing tools to fit within your existing ways of working, enhancing them in ways people will appreciate and willingly adopt.
Achieve your business ambitions with Barkers.