Performance negotiations Back-and-forth conversations to reach an agreement when the customer and the supplier do not see eye-to-eye on the solution to the performance issue. An organization’s willingness to negotiate is—at some basic level—a confession of mutual...
Termination clauses Either for convenience or for cause, include a notice to the supplier but do not set forth the structure to unwind the business relationship. In fact, these clauses may provide incentives for the supplier to “dump and run”, stripping resources from...
Ok. Exaggeration alert. I don’t hate them the way I hate Okra or cleaning the litter box. But, when stakeholders think that a complex multi-Billion dollar deal can be contracted for a “fixed price” I feel like yelling WHHAAAT??. Which I don’t – or wait until I am on...
Customer/Supplier Relationships Each customer/supplier relationship will require its own level of contract management correlating to the level of interdependence and complexity. The contract professional’s goal will be to easily identify the appropriate level of...
Recently, a newer employee working in supply chain at a public utility asked me the following: “What is the difference between a Total Cost of Ownership and Total Supplier Spend? We need to cut costs next year and there is a line in the supplier’s scorecard for TCO...
Recently I received this email from a coaching client who is a contract administrator on the buy side. His concerns and my advice are applicable to sales-side contracting too. How do I intelligently bring the contractor’s exceptions (to our master agreement) to the...