You’ve posted your RFP, evaluated dozens of candidates, and finally selected the best vendor for the job. The contract is signed and now it’s time to celebrate. Right? Not quite.
The next step in the procurement lifecycle is contract management. Not only is it critical to ensuring a project’s success, you can also improve outcomes across the board when you use a purpose-built digital solution for automating, tracking, and analyzing elements of your contracts.
In this blog post, we look at the value of contract management and the advantages that your procurement team can realize when you take contracts out of filing cabinets or shared drives and into an eProcurement platform.
The value of improved government contract management
Contract management is a phase during the procurement lifecycle when the procurement team, internal clients, and vendor work together to ensure performance meets expectations and the vendor delivers against all requirements.
In a recent episode of our podcast, Inside Public Procurement, we talked to Tyler Liu, Strategic Sourcing Services Manager at the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC), about how procurement software has streamlined the process in his department. He said, for ICBC, “having contracts management is very key, especially for big projects where there are multiple deliveries and milestones listed out in the contract.”
With contract management integrated into their digital procurement workflow, Tyler can ensure there are no gaps between the contract requirements and vendor performance—something that can create issues if there’s no monitoring or oversight in place.
Why bring contract management into eProcurement?
Integrating contract management within a single, purpose-built digital procurement platform transforms your approach from reactive to proactive, giving you the ability to stay on top of your active agreements and build strong vendor relationships.
When sourcing and contract management are hosted together, all the data you need to generate a new contract is already there for you to pull from. But that’s just the beginning. Contracting with Euna Procurement also helps you reduce risk, manage contracts more proactively, centralize data, and collaborate better.
Manage risk more effectively on existing contracts
Ensuring vendors are performing as expected is an important part of successful sourcing. Euna Procurement delivers clear visibility into vendor performance, so you can stay on top of every project easily. With contracts on a centralized, searchable platform, you quickly see what you need to focus on to make strategic decisions. You can also level up your vendor performance data by creating surveys that pull expertise and input from stakeholders. View and export survey results to see at-a-glance insights and trends in performance scores. And get instant alerts about any performance red flags, so you can get ahead of potential issues.
With tools to support contract and vendor management, your procurement team spends more time building strong relationships with great vendors. And you also minimize risk by ensuring you have plenty of lead time to go back to market if vendors are missing the mark.
Take a proactive approach to contracts
Once you have data around vendor performance, you’re better equipped to make decisions around contract renewal. But you also need to be able to track important contract dates like lead times and end dates so you know, in advance, whether you need to go back to market.
When we talked to Tyler from ICBC, he said contract management in Euna Procurement helps his team better manage hundreds of contracts with notifications about renewal timelines. “So we can remind ourselves and the business units, ‘Hey, we have a contract expiring in six months, so what’s our plan? Do we want to extend, terminate, or go to market?’”
In Euna Procurement, a calendar heatmap gives you a high-level view of important dates. Dark-color days signify more contracts expiring for greater values, allowing you to prioritize your time. You can also see visual timelines for individual contracts and set custom reminders to stay on track.
Share insights and collaborate better using a single source of truth
Having strong data is key to making the best possible contract and vendor management decisions—and it’s even more powerful when all internal and external stakeholders have visibility into the same consolidated source of truth for agreements and milestones.
Euna Procurement improves communication and collaboration that helps you manage the contract lifecycle more effectively. Clear, easy-to-use dashboards and KPIs keep everyone on the same page, giving your team the information they need to identify and respond to issues, set priorities, and continuously improve. It’s easy for everyone to view, filter, and export contract information—such as vendor documentation, insurance certificates, contract details, and more—all in one place. And auto-reminders ensure you never miss an important milestone.
Book a demo today to learn more about how Euna Procurement’s full-cycle procurement solution.