Government contract management can be divided into three overarching phases: procurement and acquisition planning, the sourcing and award, and post-award contract administration. The first two phases typically enjoy the most time, attentiveness, and financial investment. However, the neglect of the third stage - post-award management - as a tertiary duty can leave your organization unsupported and en route toward needless compliance violations, increased risk variables, and missed opportunities. It could be argued that the post award contract process is the most essential stage for your government organization, but it has notoriously been abandoned to insufficient visibility and a lack of allocated resources. Read this article to learn how to face the challenges of post award contract management head on with an actionable post award contract management software solution.
Tip #1: Understand the Post-Award Contract Management Process
Post-award contract management should consist of strategic and operational tasks. Comprehensive and attentive government contract administration is paramount for successfully managing:
- compliance to agreed upon terms and conditions.
- adherence to contract amendments.
- milestones (including payments).
- contract expirations and contract renewals.
- requirements for production, packing, and delivery of goods or services.
- claims, disputes, and quality assurance.
- vendor performance analytics and risk mitigation.
- contract collaboration.
- & contract closeouts.
Tip #2: Identify Post-Award Acquisition Challenges & Complications
Your organization faces the challenge of overseeing the most crucial stage in government contracting.
Relying upon emails, spreadsheets, memory, and unreliable stakeholders can result in bottlenecks and the lack of control required to ensure speedy issue resolution and proper compliance surrounding negotiations. Your organization must determine whether or not government is garnering value from its vendors and contracts, and subsequently analyze and identify the causes of failed value realization. The problem is that it’s virtually impossible to successfully oversee post-award contracts when faced with the following hardships:
Lack of visibility: Contracts stored in disparate locations with various methods can hinder accurate contract tracking, document version control, and change management.
Lack of standardization: Contracts that lack a standard process for expiration and renewal management can result in unwanted automatic renewals, poor negotiation positioning, squandered revenue, and missed opportunities.
Lack of communication: After a contract is finally awarded, communication problems can negatively impact post-award performance. From slow cycles to clause changes to amendments to renegotiations, insufficient communication can lead to significant issues.
Tip #3: Reap the Most Out of Contract Dollars
To reap the most out of contract dollars, your organization should maximize leadership and government contract administration training and take on the much needed role of contract performance manager.
With a healthy combination of the right training and the right contract management tools, your team can effectively manage all post-award contract duties, including:
- verification and validation of contract deliverables.
- full savings and liability management.
- phasing out low-value tasks.
- assessing contract ROI.
- comprehensive vendor management.
- revenue reporting and analytics.
- payment and invoice management.
- compliance management.
- obligations tracking.
- expiration and renewal management.
- & opportunity identification and realization.
Post-award contract management can yield big returns. Take a multi-billion dollar contracting budget, for instance. Consider that any incremental contract process improvements have the potential to bring significant returns that can continuously and exponentially increase contract performance before contract closeout.
Tip #4: Maximize Post-Award Contract Management Best Practices
Leading government contract management software can help your organization seamlessly oversee pre-award contracts (sourcing and acquisition) and post-award contract automation. Automated post-award contract administration software can improve operational efficiency and:
- help your organization to correct non-performance with post-award contract analytics.
- utilizes contract data to build more robust contracts in the future.
- optimizes vendor performance for decreased risk, supplier consolidation, and volume-level discounts.
- promotes compliance with a secure contract repository, version tracking, and full audit trails.
- leverages contract intelligence to analyze supply or security risk trends.
- provides contract visibility.
- streamlines contract writing to minimize the use of internal resources.
- makes contract drafting fast and easy and reduces errors.
- integrates with CRM, ERP, and many more helpful integrations.
Tip #5: Leverage CobbleStone Government Contract Management Software
In order to maximize all of the useful tools and processes mentioned above, your organization needs a proven post-award contract administration solution. That solution is CobbleStone Software.
Since the mid-1990s, CobbleStone has been assisting government agencies in establishing and maintaining formal business relationships with vendors, suppliers, and providers of goods and services. CobbleStone Software’s industry-defining government contract management software solution is trusted by organizations at the city, local, state, and federal levels.
CobbleStone’s Contract Insight® is a web-enabled, flexible platform with a fully integrated procurement software solution and a highly configurable public-facing portal that helps thousands of users throughout both the public and private sectors with transparency, cost-effective contract management, and improved legal compliance.
Contract Insight is hailed as a visionary staple of effective pre-award and post-award government contract management and is conveniently located on the United States GSA Schedule 70.
Discover why thousands of contract managers trust CobbleStone Software with their contract management needs. To learn more about CobbleStone’s unparalleled post-award contract management software suite, book a free demo with a Contract Insight expert today!
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Are you interested in future-minded contract management software tools? In our blog - 6 Critical Contract Management Tools for 2021 – learn how to leverage industry-leading CLM software tools for streamlined, user-friendly, and low-friction contract lifecycle management success!
