Contract Management Best Practices

Join RPI while we present Contract Management: Best Practices. Learn how the Contract Management module integrates with your procurement S3 modules to improve your contract process.

Speaker 1:           Good afternoon everyone. We’re going to go ahead and get started. I want to thank you once again for attending this afternoon’s webinar on Contract Management best practices. We have a great presenter with us here today, Miss Stephanie Kowal, and I will hand off to her in just a minute. First, I have a couple of housekeeping items. One is there is a live video feed with this webinar. You should be able to toggle the camera and the PowerPoint to your liking. Second, you’ll notice if you attended the first two webinars of the day, we welcome questions. Any questions at all you have, please type them into the GoToMeeting module chat or questions box. We’ll ask them during the presentation if they fit in. If not, we’ll save them until the end, and if we run out of time, we will follow up via email.

Lastly, this is the question we get most often, so I’ll answer it up-front. We will be recording this presentation. This presentation will be available to you to view and to share with your colleagues. It will be on YouTube, and it will be on our website. It usually takes us a day or two to get it up there, but we will distribute that link to the email of all attendees. Without further ado, I give you Miss Stephanie Kowal.

Stephanie:          Hello everyone. Very excited to go through this presentation on Contract Management best practices with you. Here’s today’s agenda, what we’ll be going through. It’s a lot of information. More of an overview and some best practices if you’re thinking of implementing this new application.

First off, what is Lawson’s Contract Management? It’s actually a rich client that’s installed on your PC, much like how SmartOffice is. It integrates heavily with S3 Procurement module. All these different areas, inventory control, purchase order, accounts receivable, general ledger, it’s all connected with Contract Management. Also, things like rebates with accounts receivable. There’s also on a separate application, strategic sourcing, that’s used along with supplier portal, which is integrated as well.

It’s designed to improve your contract processes and management. It’s really meant to automate a lot of your bid processes and the renewal of your contracts. It allows you to use electronic approvals instead of having that piece of paper follow you around. It really creates a lot of visibility around the whole contract life cycle and your spend. This can be used amongst multiple different organizations, not just healthcare, for multiple different types of contracts. Not even just item special services.

It provides better integration with 832s. If you’re using those now, there’s way more that you can do with contract management. It also allows you better management of those special items. You can add special items to purchase order agreement. How about that? Very exciting.

Contract Management integrates with Strategic Sourcing. I’m really going to be focusing on contract management today. Just so you know, the two share a lot of information. A lot of the setup that you’ll be doing in Contract Management, if you choose to implement Strategic Sourcing after the fact, you can use the same information. If you’re using Strategic Sourcing now but don’t use Contract Management, again, half your setup’s already there. These are two separate Landmark modules that are installed separately but can work together.

Here’s your challenges. You all know them of managing your contract today. There’s a whole bunch of different processes, different team members trying to organize this information, trying to load items, looking at of your items on contract and seeing which items your requesters are ordering on specials and trying to bring those all together. There’s no visibility there, or very little visibility to bring all this information together. It’s difficult to report on any of your contract performance. You miss a lot of your milestones and deliverables. You don’t know how to track those rebates easily or when to renew those contracts.

There’s also a lot of legal issues, compliance that you need to adhere to. That can be difficult to manage as well. That puts you in contract violations.

Here’s a typical project approach. Really it’s starting off with gathering the requirements of your organization. What are your business needs? What’s your approval structure? Can you utilize your requisition approval