Our team can help you with all aspects of contract management. We can help you negotiate a good deal and manage contracts effectively throughout their duration. Our training offering can help you better manage your contracts in-house, and help you navigate the tricky task of ending a contract.

Contract management

Contract management doesn’t stop with getting a good deal. Successful organisations manage contracts closely throughout their operational lives, to make sure they’re always getting the value they deserve. We can help you put robust contract management procedures in place.

Why is contract management important?

There are numerous reasons why contract management has never been more important, including:

  • increased outsourcing;
  • greater reliance on contracts to deliver business critical services; and
  • high profile contract failures.

These factors are forcing organisations across all sectors to recognise how critical effective contract management is to their businesses success.

There are also greater demands in areas like governance, risk and compliance management. Additionally, there is pressure on organisations to maximise value for money and make savings where they can through effective contract management.

How we can help you

Over the years, we have helped a number of private and public sector organisations improve their contract management capability.

First, we will benchmark your existing contract management function against our best practice contract management framework to assess their maturity and identify gaps. During this assessment, we pay particular attention to any of your organisation’s unique circumstances, risks and contract landscape, making sure any recommendations are tailored to your organisation.

We will then design and implement our suggested improvements into your contract management processes and controls, including:

  • developing contract management toolkits;
  • implementing effective contract management processes and controls for specific contracts; and
  • providing contract management training.
  • Contract training
  • Contract termination

Contract training

Contract training

High profile cases of overspending, caused by poor contract management, regularly hit the headlines. Training your staff to better understand contract management best practice can help you avoid blowing your budget.

Effective management of your contracts is key to maximising value, managing risk and preventing contract failures. Our dedicated team has lots of experience helping private and public sector clients do just that.

We offer private training courses for your organisation at a location of your choice. You can also come to one of our public training courses, which are hosted within our offices. During the sessions, you’ll learn best practice on managing contracts with third-party suppliers. This will help you optimise your relationships and resources and lead to the best commercial outcomes for you.

We cover key learning areas, including:

  • required contract management processes and controls based on a comprehensive leading practice contract management framework;
  • how to analyse and categorise key contracts and supplier relationships to flag those that need more attention;
  • risks and opportunities throughout the contract life cycle, including when contracts are at their most vulnerable and high impact activities are essential; and
  • commercial risk transfer and how this should be understood to tailor and prioritise contract management.

For more information, get in touch with Walter Akers.

Walter has worked with some of the world’s leading multinational companies, across a number of industries, as well as UK central government departments and local authorities. 

Contract termination

Contract termination

The end of a key contract or supplier relationship can be a difficult time. We can help you approach it in the right way, minimising conflict and maximising future opportunities.

Let’s imagine a supplier isn’t keeping to your contract, or the relationship is showing signs it is no longer working. Performance is failing and costs are escalating.

We’re here to help.

Due diligence, contract re-negotiation and recovery

We help organisations navigate this complex journey, including steps like:

  • commercial due diligence to identify what went wrong and how this can be improved in the new contract;
  • finding underperformance and billing errors and recovering them from the supplier;
  • negotiating the contract exit;
  • re-procurement and service transition to a new supplier; and
  • contract termination and insourcing of services back in-house.

All of the above involve a complex set of change and transformation steps that can test an organisation’s capabilities to its limits.

For more information about how we can help your business, please contact Walter Akers.