Contracts are the framework that allows companies to work with each other and most organisations will have many different contracts in place at the same time with customers and suppliers. During projects and wider programmes these contracts are often critical in delivering to both time and budget.

Contract Renewals and Re-negotiations – are your projects ahead of the game?

How often do companies only realise at the last minute or worse still let contracts expire before they are due for renewal? Does this lead to lost opportunities to perhaps get better terms next time or even to losing out on making additional sales for requested changes? On the other hand, often it can be too late to secure key resources or sub-contractors because they have been reassigned by suppliers.

Within projects (like ongoing operations) contracts still need to be in place and monitored. Often though projects are much more dynamic and time critical. The ability to keep on top of project contract renewals ahead of time can help to keep any project on track and identify opportunities to address changes head of time.

Project Office oversight – the latest contract overview at your fingertips

How reliable is project management information on contracts in your company? Are they being handled individually by each project manager, the programme or stakeholders and in different ways? Perhaps a clunky internal system is in place relying in data to be input by lots of individuals without the true picture and not taking into account the needs of projects at all.

These are some of the challenges often faced by senior management and the project office in getting a reliable overview of contracts in place to deliver a project. Having the ability to extract the latest overall contract information at a click of a mouse would be a great asset.

Intelligent project contracts – what about if the contract itself could tell you it is coming up for renewal?

Attaching information to and storing contracts as specific contract documents within a project information management platform means the contract expiry date of the document can work for you. This can trigger email reminders to key people a set number of days before a contract is due to expire so they can take steps to renew well in advance.

What’s more if this can be linked directly to the relevant project then the project manager themselves can take steps to ensure their contracts are in order. Often in larger organisations contracts are administered centrally perhaps by a sourcing department without the knowledge of how critical these are to the delivery of a particular project.

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