By digitizing the bid and RFP process with solutions like Euna Procurement, public procurement teams gain efficiency and visibility into all of their procurement activities—but that’s not the end of the story!
Procurement teams need to stay informed with their purchasing decisions after the contract is awarded, in order to:
- Stay on top of key milestones and changes in active spend
- Monitor supplier performance
- Plan future procurement activities
Cloud-based contract management solutions pick up where the bid and RFP process ends, enabling procurement teams to connect their sourcing event to the resulting contract. These solutions also allow teams to manage related documents, agreements, and key dates all in one solution–encapsulating the entire contract life cycle in one contract management system.
Here, we’re going to discuss four ways contract management software makes it easy for teams to close the loop on their bid and RFP decisions.
1. Increase Contract Visibility and Seamlessly Generate Reports
A good contract management solution offers automation that allows you to:
- View contract information at-a-glance on a central dashboard
- Filter contracts to locate the information you need (e.g. filter by start date, contract value, commodity code, or custom fields you have pre-determined)
- Export custom reports to Excel
Fun fact: With Euna Procurement you have the option to post contracts publicly within the portal and filter what information you want publicly presented.
From our contract management software, you can click into each individual contract record to see detailed contract data, including:
- A visual timeline of the contract negotiation terms, including lead time, start date, and end date
- Custom reminders to notify you of important milestones in the contract
- Supplier documentation, including whether it is up-to-date or expired
- The current supplier performance score, as determined by supplier performance surveys
- Contract details, term and change orders, and spend against contract
- Supplier contact information
- Contract documents
Reporting is easy with all the information in one place and readily exportable. You can also give other users in your organization that don’t manage contracts access to contract details (to view or edit), so all contract stakeholders are on the same page.
2. Create Templates for Recurring Contract Agreements
To save time on the set-up of recurring contracts, you can create templates in our contract management software that are pre-configured to include the default details, documents, and people for a given contract type.
Every time you create a new contract using this template, all the preconfigured information is there—saving time and ensuring consistency.
3. Generate Contracts from Awarded Proposals
With purpose-built contract management software, you can instantly create a contract record from a completed sourcing project – all of the information can live in one centralized solution.
This streamlines contract creation by automatically carrying over relevant information from the sourcing project into the contract record, including:
- Public files from the original sourcing project (e.g. the IFB and Addenda)
- The awarded supplier’s submission documents
From there, you can add the contract document itself, include additional users from your organization who should be associated with the project, and add supplier contact information.
It’s a simple and straightforward way to ensure continuity in your procurement activities.
4. Manage Supplier Performance Throughout Your Contract Management Process
When you use purpose-built tech to streamline contract management, you have the ability to track supplier performance and maintain a strong business relationship with your suppliers to maximize value.
You can dig deeper into supplier data with contract management software by:
- Configuring surveys to measure supplier performance
- Adding respondents that will receive the survey
- Viewing survey results and frequency
- Exporting survey results
- Viewing trends from past surveys to see if there is improvement
Ongoing feedback on supplier performance is displayed in an intuitive format in the contract record. This is valuable information to help you forecast future procurement needs and bandwidth.
For example, for suppliers who are performing below your organization’s performance threshold, you can anticipate that you will likely go back out to the market at the time of contract renewal. For suppliers who are performing well and whose contact includes the option to renew, you’ll plan on renewing.
Managing contracts with at-a-glance insight into at-risk suppliers, you’ll ensure that your contract negotiations with poor performance never slip through the cracks—saving time and frustration for you and your end users.
Achieve Efficient Contract Management with Euna Procurement
By implementing purpose-built contract management systems like Euna Procurement, your agency can rest assured that your contract process is efficient, effective, and accurate. As a contract manager, you’ll have insight into all the data you need about current contracts and supplier performance to make the most informed decisions.
Ready to learn more? Request a demo of our contract management tool with Euna Procurement.