The client had experienced an outage of a key IT public facing platform. This was very damaging to their reputation, and we were asked to carry out a review of how this had occurred and what could be done to ensure it didn’t happen again.
It became obvious that the client had little interaction with the supplier although the service they provided was critical to the smooth running of the client’s business.
One of the outcomes of the review was the requirement for stronger contract management for these specific services and across the whole organisation.
We were appointed to improve the approach to contract management through a skills transfer approach which included training and supporting the team to embed good practices into the organisation. This was a collaborative approach working very closely with the client team.
This was provisioned by:
• The delivery of a training programme which followed a clear commercial process.
• A contract management tool kit, such as a risk/value matrix calculator, contract register and meeting agendas and template.
• Attending supplier meetings and negotiations providing hands-on support to the contract managers.
We initiated, together with the Procurement Team, to build a contract register ensuring detailed contract information which also included named contract managers, ensuring those people were aware of the role that had been allocated to them. We supported this activity with them with hand on training, highlighting the significant benefits of effective contract management to the organisation.
We completed a detailed risk/value assessments on their supplier base in order that training could focus on key contracts and the bespoke training sessions could be tailored to meet the needs of the organisation.
Several training sessions were carried out describing the Contract Management process with practical application, using the appropriate management tools.
Further support was provided by attending supplier meetings with the contract managers to support them with setting out the needs of the organisation and the requirements of the supplier relationship going forward.
The organisation had a concise contract register which could be used for building future procurement pipelines and managing spend profiles.
They now had a good understanding of the risk profile associated with their third party spend.
With our support they were able to renegotiate the terms of relevant contract so that KPIs were more meaningful and the overall cost of spend was reduced as they worked proactively with suppliers. This approach meant that the client was able to reshape their contract to provide, within public sector contract rules, contractual arrangements that met their changing requirements during the life of the contract.