Fixing the Contract Bottleneck

Well, I think contracting runs alongside risk, right? Because at the end of the day, if you flagged up something in your risk process, it probably needs to find its way into your contract.

And so you can't get the signature on the dotted line until you've actually closed both processes.

So contracting is, I think, interviewed quite closely.

But look, I think we're assuming here that that this is a new buy and that you're going to have to enter a new contract to begin with.

So first thing I'd do is make sure no one in the business actually asks you for a contract for something that already exists, right? But once you get to that stage, I think having a clear set of defined procedures, I think, to help things go along quite quickly.

Here's a really good one, right? NDA.

I think most companies already do this one pretty well, which is there's a standard mutual NDA template that you're free to use.

You just pick it up and send it to your supplier.

They can sign it provided they don't need to change any terms, etc., If there is any terms that need changing, then what I've seen a lot of businesses do is set up dedicated mailboxes or offshore kind of service, someone that provides a service that can actually advise on any contract changes to an NDA.

And so follow a similar kind of process with contracting.

The next step is then What kind of contract are you entering into? Is it a framework agreement, an MSA? Does it link to an MSA? Is it a completely new statement of work? And do you have the templates kind of ready to go for either procurement or the business to put those contracts together? I would say the first version should almost always try and comply and adhere as much as possible to your company paper.

There will be cases where the supplier will, like if you grew up against Microsoft or Oracle, they're not going to care about your paper.

They want their paper.

So that's going to be, you need to break it down and think about those kinds of dimensions as well.

Because if it's a big supplier like a Microsoft, if it's a major supplier like that, then you need to have the legal team ready to deal with that side of things because you simply just don't have a lot of influence over that side.

Whereas anything that you can influence, anything that can go on your company paper, you should have templates ready to go.

And then I think looking carefully, the approvals process is really important.

I see so many duplicate approvals.

You get an approver that does the budget, an approver that does the contract, an approver that does the risk, an approver that does whatever.

And sometimes it's the same approver quite often.

And so see if you can actually just either get some kind of consolidation there and see if you can save yourself an approval too over the contract.

That's usually quite good to do.

Last thing I want to mention is the system that you actually use to actually execute a contract kind of negotiation.

Look, I think the best tool is always Microsoft Word.

That's the fallback for most companies, most lawyers.