Financial Services companies have a strong culture of IT system support. Bringing value in IT service delivery as well as procurement and other vendor and supplier management categories reaches a critical point when the volume, complexity or both, of the agreements under management increases beyond the capability of mere spreadsheets and in-house databases.

Supplier management needs strong system support to provide visibility and process accountability around every day contract management tasks, and auditability to the highest level on staff and supplier performance.

Large outsourcing agreements need strong management from the customer side to prevent the ‘cart leading the horse’ and vendors dictating terms under which contracts are delivered. All this needs is reliable and timely access to vendor performance and activities being performed and pro-active monitoring of deliverables and rates. Access to rebates and volume discounts can be realised when the customer takes a pro-active and educated approach to contract management. Of course pro-active management helps to ensure desired outcomes are reached prior to penalties needing to be invoked.

By utilising a strong end-to-end contract lifecycle management system such as Open Windows contracts-ENTERPRISE, disparate teams within your organisation can manage their day to day tasks in one centralised system, that provides auditability and visibility across both vendor and category portfolios. This real time performance snapshot ensures all activity is visible to category managers making important decisions about reviews and renewals with suppliers providing many services across the group.

Read more about Open Windows contracts-ENTERPRISE.