There are many procurement and contracts management teams out there in organisations that are just not taking post-award contracts management seriously enough, or just do not know how to manage it or where to start in managing the activities involved in post-award.
We have found organisations dealing with thousands of contracts spanning across various functions such as legal, sales, HR, procurement, and so on. And unfortunately, we know a lot of organisations are manually managing these contracts either on paper, shared drives, or spreadsheets, making managing contracts and tracking post-award contract compliance very problematic.
We want to help by discussing all that you need to know about downstream contracts management, including, what it means, the challenges you may face and what is the best solution to tackle the post-ward process.
In the contract’s lifecycle, they are two stages, pre-award/upstream, and post-award/downstream, both needed efficient and proactive contracts management.
Pre-award contracts management are the activities such as drafting the contract, negotiating the terms and conditions and the execution before the contract is signed.
Post-award contracts management are the activities, after the contract is signed, which include ensuring that the ongoing compliance with the terms and conditions are met, managing any contracts amendments and variations, as well as manging the any key contract dates, such as adhering to production, QA, delivery requirements and expiry and renewals dates; and measuring supplier performance.
Well, what we understand from our customer’s currently using our Accord Contracts Management System, is that procurement and contracts management teams are absolutely brilliant at the upstream pre-award activities, with well thought-out and seamless workflows, however, what tends to happen after they secure a deal, is that is simple filed away and forgot about, so the team have no visibility or are even aware if that contract is delivering the value that they expected or even aware of those important key contract dates.
By filing away contracts after contracts are signed and not going through the downstream stage of the post-award contract management activities, the milestone of payment, delivery, quality of good, etc. do not get tracked efficiently and nobody knows when the clock started ticking on your contracts, making it difficult to understand and control contract expiries or auto-renews – without any evaluation of contract performance too! All these issues and challenges mean your procurement and contract managing teams lose out on any opportunities to create savings, cross-sell, and up-sell; and the list goes on.
Automation. Automating your downstream post-award contracts management process will successfully address all those challenges we discussed previously.
In most organisations, once a contract is signed, it goes into storage and is often never given a second look. There is no way to track or monitor a contract’s performance. This negligence can expose companies to massive compliance risks and cost them huge financial and reputational losses.
By automating the post-award contracts management activities, it will enable you to streamline and standardize the entire post-sign off contract management process. It ensures efficient management of obligations, expiries, and renewals; and help identify opportunities for savings, cross-sell, upsell as you will have a better overview of contract performance.
Here are five benefits of automating post-award contracts management:
These five benefits can be quickly realised and made today, provided the correct contracts management system is in place.
Gain post-award contracts management with Accord, the stress-free contracts management solution.
Automate your contracts lifecycle management process, with an easy-to-use system that efficiently and effectively manages all your contracts in one place, sets alerts and reminder for expiries and renewals and drive focus on your performance tracking.
100% of surveyed clients agreed that Accord has been essential to maintaining and managing their contracts.
For more information on contract management or Accord, please reach out to us at hello@accordcontracts.com
Book a demo of Accord with the team.
We’ll chat through your requirements and see if Accord is right for you.
We’ll send you demo access and our onboarding kit to help you decide what you need.
You decide if we’re right for you. No pushy sales calls.
Like what you see and hear? Let’s get you onboarded with Accord!