Contract Risk Assessment Surveys
Contract Risk Surveys
Increasing Contract Management Effectiveness - Implementing
Better, Consistent Organization-wide Practices and Procedures
for Drafting, Negotiating, Signing, Fulfilling and Storing Contracts
Quantisoft's Contract Risk Assessment Surveys gather information about practices and procedures for drafting, negotiating, signing, fulfilling and storing contracts across organizations. The objective is to use the information gathered by the survey to develop better consistency across the organization to maximize the efficiency of contracting practices and processes and minimize risks associated with any inadequate contracting controls.
The questions in Contract Risk Assessment Surveys are designed to gather information for analyzing how organizations manage contracts. The insight and information managers and other employees involved in the contract process provide is essential for filling in significant knowledge gaps and for calibrating contract practices across business areas in order to develop successful and scalable company-wide practices.
Identifying Contract Risks
Quantisoft's Contract Risk Assessment Surveys identify enterprise-wide and organizational unit specific contract-related risks. Some of the contract risks identified by the surveys include:
- Risk of unauthorized employees signing contracts committing the organization financially and legally
- Risk of contract non-compliance by suppliers and other entities
- Risk of not monitoring/following up on contract terms and requirements
- Risk of creating and signing contracts that are unfavorable to your organization
- Risk of creating and/or signing contracts without advice/review by legal counsel
- Risk of misplacing original signed contracts
- Risk of having inefficient and inconsistent contract practices and procedures across the organization
- Risk of not keeping contracts and contract terms confidential
- Risk to the organization's assets, intellectual property, etc. due to poorly written/executed contracts
Issues included in Quantisoft's Contract Risk Assessment Surveys
Quantisoft's Contract Risk Assessment Surveys include the following and other issues:
- Identification of current contract practices
- Awareness of contract practices
- Types of contracts by organizational unit
- Awareness of/compliance with contract signing authority
- Typical value of individual contracts by business units
- Annual value of contracts by business units
- Use of third party contracts/contract terms vs. in-house contracts
- Use of contract templates
- In-house, external or no legal review of contracts
- Identifying concerns about contracts
- Practices for storing and preserving paper and electronic copies of contracts
- Maintaining and purging paper and electronic copies of contract drafts
- Maintaining signed copies of final contracts
- Completeness and accuracy of any contract libraries
- Tracking ongoing contract rights and obligations
- Contract document retention guidelines
- On-site and off-site storage of contracts
- Awareness of contract terms that impact business
- Responsibility for tracking and monitoring contract compliance
- Identifying who keeps copies of contracts
- Dissemination of information about key contracts impacting your business
- Contract compliance improvement opportunities
Benefits of Quantisoft's Contract Surveys
Quantisoft's Contract Risk Assessment Surveys provide several benefits that mitigate risks and increase performance across organizations:
- Improve contract tracking and contract compliance resulting in reduced contract creation and contract management costs
- Ensure suppliers and other outside parties are complying with your organization's contracts
- Provide legal staff with information for enhancing their support of the contract process
- Avoid costly contract related litigation
- Determine how well contract practices and processes have been communicated and are being followed across the organization
- Use the contract risk survey findings for contract risk mitigation and to design and implement a consistent, enhanced contract management process and contract practices
- Reduce the risk of unauthorized creation and signing of contracts
- Provide managers with useful information about their business unit's contracts and how well they are creating and managing contracts
- Ensure that paper and electronic contracts are stored securely
