Welcome to our blog series on post-award contract management! In this series, we will discuss all that you need to know about post-award contract management—what it means, the challenges contract managers face, how best to go about it, and so on. We will take on the most frequently asked questions we have received from our customers and bring all the answers to you. For starters, let us discuss what does the term “post-award contract management” really stands for.
A contract’s lifecycle can be broadly classified into two stages: pre-award and post-award contract management.
What is Pre-award Contract Management:
Activities before a contract are signed consist of: drafting the contract, negotiating the terms and conditions, and getting it executed.
What is Post-award Contract Management:
Activities, after a contract is signed, include: ensuring ongoing compliance with the terms and conditions; managing contract amendments; adhering to production, QA, packaging, and delivery requirements; resolving claims and disputes; and measuring commercial performance.
Why Post-award Contract Management:
To answer this, imagine your team secures an important deal. What do you do next? If you simply file it away and forget about it, it may not deliver quite the value that’s expected. The milestones of payment, delivery, quality of goods, etc. do not get tracked efficiently; nobody knows when the clock starts ticking and the contract expires or auto-renews (without any evaluation of contract performance); you lose out on opportunities for savings, cross-sell, and up-sell; and the list goes on.
Now that we have established that post-award contract management is worthwhile, let’s dive deeper into the obstacles facing the contract manager today in our next post in this series. Until then, stay tuned!
Also, read:
Learn about Zycus’s Post Award Contract Risk Management Solution.
