You’ve ran your tender, selected a supplier that meets all your needs, and onboarded any remaining supplier data. Now, it’s time to establish set terms and agreements for the parties involved. This is where the supplier contract management processes begin.
What is Supplier Contract Management?
Supplier contract management refers to managing your legal agreements with suppliers throughout their lifecycle, from the contract initiation to renewals or terminations.
It’s important that this is managed in an efficient manner to ensure contract renewals dates are met.
However, supplier contract management isn’t a simple task. Without systems in place to manage contracts from a supply base of hundreds, it’s easy for supplier contracts to become unmanageable due to the sheer number of contracts within a supply base.
However, there are several best practices which can be followed to help keep supplier contracts under your control, and to always be audit ready.
To learn more about the importance of supplier contract management, see our article on the subject here.
Contract Lifecycle Management Best Practice
Manage from One Central Location
By keeping all contracts in one single-agreed location, you’re less likely to end up with several different versions of the same documentation. It’s easier to identify which documentation is the correct and most up-to-date version.
Contract Dashboards
Dashboards are the answer to low contract visibility. It’s difficult to identify expiry and renewal dates or even see which contracts have made progress towards their renewal without a cumbersome, manual search.
By making supplier dashboards a key part of your procurement process, you can see when contracts are due to expire at-a-glance, making it much easier to decide what contract needs prioritising.
Automated Workflows and Alerts
Another way to reduce missed renewal dates is to ensure that alerts are set up to remind you when contracts are due for renewal.
With an automated reminder, it eliminates the need to manually check renewal dates, which can take time when lots of renewal dates need to be examined.
Integrate with wider Supplier Management Systems
With more contract management taking place on a solely digital basis, it’s important that the contracts must be signed digitally as well.
To learn more about supplier management, see our guide here.
Auditable System
Ultimately, you need to make sure that any system you used, whether it’s paper-based, spreadsheets or otherwise, needs to be ready for an audit at a moment’s notice.
Why ARCUS® Supplier Contract Management (SCM) is the Tool You Need.
At Trade Interchange, we provide software for supplier management, covering all processes across source-to-contract.
ARCUS® Supplier Contract Management is our cloud-based solution, offering a centralised repository for contracts to be managed throughout their lifecycle.
With automated workflows and alerts, you gain more oversight across contract management and can easily stay on-top of renewals.
When used with ARCUS® Analytics, you gain visibility across your contract management, able to view supplier contract information at-a-glance.
To learn more about ARCUS® SCM, see the webpage here.