SHC consultants have experience working with many different types of contract governance models, and we are well placed to advise on the effectiveness of contract governance tools.
One vital tool that SHC has generated for several clients is our Deliverable and Obligation tracker. See below for more details on what this is and why it is important
Contract Deliverables and Obligations
There are literally thousands of major outsourcing contracts in force today in the US. Most large companies will have at least one or more in place. Typically these contracts are both large in size and complex in nature.
The operational delivery of services in contracts are normally tracked and reported very effectively. However, outside of the services delivery aspects, your outsourcing contract contains a whole array of deliverables and obligations, which fall on both Service Provider and Client parties. The numbers of deliverables and obligations in any contract will clearly vary, however, the overall number will surprise you. A typical outsourcing contract will have 100 – 300 separate D&Os. Do you know what these are for YOUR contract?
Why is tracking Necessary?
Although most outsourcing contracts cover much of the same ground the specific details of YOUR contract will be different than all of the others. This raises some serious questions for Contract and Vendor managers
- Whether managing one or many such contracts, whether you are on the Client side or the Service Provider side, do you fully understand what is in YOUR contract?
- When internal audit, contract compliance, or senior management come calling can you truly say you are fully monitoring the contract?
- When/if there is an informal or formal contract dispute can you quickly and correctly say whether you are in compliance, or whether the other party is in compliance?
What is the SHC D&O Tracker?
The SHC D&O Tracker is an extensive spread sheet that we build for you to record and track your contract deliverables and obligations. It is comprised of two related components:
- An extraction from your contract of all of the D&O’s so that they are located in one place, thus easy to see access and track. This part of the spreadsheet contains fields to allow you to:
- Reference and locate the D&O to its position in the contract
- See the detailed original contract text that makes up the D&O
- Designate monitoring ownerships for each D&O
- View and sort the spreadsheet by any of the fields
Building on the extracted table of D&Os the base spreadsheet can be further tailored to facilitate monitoring and tracking of each of the D&O’s. This tailoring will be based on needs of your situation. We can develop it to include dashboards and tracking for each D&O line item, tracking by organizational owner, and/or overall contract tracking as needed.