And it does not really matter who signed it or whether they had authority to do so in the first place.

Fortune one thousand companies can have as many as 100,000 contracts. Most of these companies do not have contract management software, maybe as few as 15%.. We also know that companies that do use contract management solutions have compliance ratings significantly higher than companies that do not. It is a well known fact that these solutions can reduce administrative overhead by up to 30%. Those savings although significant from an ROI perspective pale in comparison to the loses associated with a contracts in evergreen status or auto renewal that may include price increase language that required written notice to terminate or renegotiate a contract already in place. Just imagine a bulk fuel contract for millions of gallons with a single basis point escalator above a current Platts, OPIS or Gulf coast index if the contract evergreens. Ouch.

The good news is that a contract management solution like SafeContract? can solve this problem and provide a near instantaneous ROI. SafeContract? is offered in the form of Software as a Service or SaaS which makes it much more affordable than an in-house solution. The good news is that the data is yours and you only use as much of the system as you need.

Don?t wait any longer to reduce your administrative costs, manage discounts and rebates, make your auditors happy with improved compliance and eliminate ever greening.

Contact SafeSourcing? today.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments.

If you happen to be a large company as all in the fortune 500 are, this number is enormous.

The reality is that most of the information in a contract is not language one needs to be concerned with unless there is some form of break down in the relationship, product or services deliverables. There are however some fields that we want to know about such as expiration dates, escalator language, written notice dates, milestone attainment and service levels to name a few. Most of this data can be referred to as Meta data or essentially data about data. These data represent the information companies should be aware of in order to reduce their exposure to leakage and evergreening.

After many pages of definitions and legalese, most contracts can be broken down into the following areas.

1.?Mutual Consent
2.?Offer and Acceptance
3.?Mutual Consideration
4.?Performance or Delivery
5.?Good Faith
6.?No Violation of Public Policy
?

Contract management does not have to be a difficult process. Contact SafeSourcing if you?d like to begin to bring your contracts under smart management with SafeContract? which includes the development of your Meta data tables.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments.

If you happen to be a large company as all in the fortune 500 are, this number is enormous.

The reality is that most of the information in a contract is not language one needs to be concerned with unless there is some form of break down in the relationship, product or services deliverables. There are however some fields that we want to know about such as expiration dates, escalator language, written notice dates, milestone attainment and service levels to name a few. Most of this data can be referred to as Meta data or essentially data about data. These data represent the information companies should be aware of in order to reduce their exposure to leakage and evergreening.

After many pages of definitions and legalese, most contracts can be broken down into the following areas.

1. Mutual Consent
2. Offer and Acceptance
3. Mutual Consideration
4. Performance or Delivery
5. Good Faith
6. No Violation of Public Policy
 

Contract management does not have to be a difficult process. Contact SafeSourcing if you’d like to begin to bring your contracts under smart management with SafeContract™ which includes the development of your Meta data tables.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments.

If you put a bunch of senior executives in a room and ask them what they would like in the way of contract control; the meeting could last weeks. At the end of that time you might not have anything that resembles what you started looking for. And that is why we have the saying that a camel is a horse created by committee.

Most contract management systems have relatively short ROI periods. In fact a company might even be lucky enough as they go through their data collection process to find a single contract that when analyzed might pay for the entire system.

There are all sorts of benefits associated with using contract management software. Probably the most important and least recognized of which is finally having all spend data in one location enabling more effective negotiations. If you have ever run an e-procurement event and tried to assemble a simple specification or incumbent supplier data you already understand the time involved. Administrative costs alone can be reduced by 25-30%.  That’s a huge number in today’s world of insufficient staff.

If you want to get started, here are some basics that a system should be able to provide.

1. Create contracts
2. Maintain contracts
3. Control contracts
4. Track user access to contracts
5. Track and monitor the status of contract Meta data
    a. Award date
    b. Contract begin date
    c. Contract end date
    d. Begin delivery date
    e. Escalator language
    f. Notification clauses
    g. Termination Clauses
6. Automatically alert buyers and management of required actions
7. Custom Reporting
8. Supplier Scorecards

If you want to get started tomorrow, contact SafeSourcing and ask about SafeContract™.

We look forward to and appreciate you comments

In this case your supplier wins because your contract contains evergreen language. Some retailer?s think this is a good thing and it could be. Paired with other language that might identify escalator or de-escalator language that protects both the supplier and the buyer against abnormal commodity increases this could be win-win. The bigger issue is who is responsible for monitoring the dates and how will you be alerted if the adjustments don?t take place?

This begs the question; just what are are evergreen clauses within a contract and what do you need to do to be careful with them.

According to Black?s Law Dictionary an Evergreen contract is a contract that renews itself from one term to the next in the absence of contrary notice by one of the parties?

The potential problem with an ?evergreen? clause in your contract is that this type of contract automatically renews at the end of the contract term, unless one of the parties notifies the other party that it does not want to renew the contract.? This notice normally must be given within a specified time period such as 60 to 90 days prior to the end of the current contract term. This takes us back to who is going to monitor this time frame and alert you to the fact that something is required?

A significant step in conducting quality e-negotiation events is to understand the contracts you are wishing to negotiate.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments.

Contract Management 101 is as much a foreign language as Spanish 101. Beyond storage and understanding the Meta data that will mitigate your risk relative to contract leakage, understanding the terminology in your contracts and how they are organized is a daunting task.

There are many law dictionaries available in hard cover and over the internet that can help, but remember just having one does not make understanding these documents any easier. Here is a list of many of the most popular.

1. Anderson’s Dictionary of Law (1893)
2. Bouvier’s Law Dictionary 1856 Edition
3. Criminal Justice Today Glossary
4. Criminology Today Glossary
5. Criminal Law Glossary
6. Canadian Bankruptcy Glossary
7. Divorce Law Dictionary
8. Duhaime’s Law Dictionary
9. Everybody’s Legal Glossary
10. Glossary of Commercial Fraud
11. International Law Glossary
12. INS Glossary of Immigration and Naturalization Law
13. Law Glossary
14. Merriam-Webster’s Law Dictionary
15. Legal Lexicon’s Lyceum
16. Merriam-Webster’s Law Dictionary
17. Oxford Law Dictionary Top of Form

Certainly one could argue that some of these might be eliminated for business use, and this author would agree. However others might argue that separating from an unfavorable contract or supplier relationship  can be as difficult as a divorce so maybe we should leave that one on the list.

Be careful out there.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments