Manufacturing is complex, and whatever product you are making, managing the assets of the business and ensuring that processes run smoothly and without interruption is the top priority, both financially and for contract retention and winning new business.
Richard Savage, chief technology officer at Contract Sentinel, looks at how a new cloud-based system is leading the way in total contract cost and performance management in the manufacturing sector.
Contracts are the lifeblood of manufacturing. Ensuring that they are run to maximum efficiency, on time, on budget and without any delays or hiccups, and of course reviewed before they roll over, is essential. This is becoming increasingly hard to achieve with human resources alone.
Manufacturers are beginning to realise that service performance is a key factor in winning business and optimising service profits. But this means knowing and understanding the precise status of both supplier and client contracts at any given time.
And clients are rightly demanding more clarity and transparency about the true cost of contracts, and expect suppliers to provide performance metrics. The pressure is on.
Many companies running service contracts struggle to do so effectively because of the sheer quantity of elements they need to manage, and their human resources simply cannot cope with the complexity.
This is a common situation: paper contracts are filed away, data is kept on spreadsheets and isn’t up to date, and there is no simple way of reviewing contract status or renewal dates, which can be very costly if they roll over without review. Nothing links up, nothing is secure and key aspects are easily overlooked. There is a real pain factor here that many manufacturers will understand.
Contract Sentinel looked at all these challenges and was determined to develop a better, automated way to manage contracts. The result is a groundbreaking new cloud-based IT platform, also called Contract Sentinel, that allows total monitoring of service agreement performance and cost, and presents all the information in an easy-to-use, single-view dashboard.
Unlike most contract management systems which are merely repositories for information, Contract Sentinel is dynamic, intuitive, intelligent and able to continuously capture and analyse performance and cost, show how multiple contracts are linked, and provide real-time data throughout the entire contract lifecycle to executive, operations, management, finance and the suppliers too. This gives everyone a point of reference at any given time. Informed decision-making becomes easy.
Contract Sentinel is already proving its value in the manufacturing sector. Cirris, a leading UK provider of cable harness testing solutions to major organisations like British Aerospace, McLaren and NASA, is making significant cost savings with the system, which is helping them to avoid potentially costly contract roll-overs.
Cirris managing director Dave Morris says: “We are a global company that has been making cable and wiring harness test equipment for 30 years, and we work in a wide range of industries such as aerospace, medical and motor racing.
“Although we work all over the world and have a high-profile client base, we are a small, busy company employing just 10 people. In the past this has presented us with some very costly problems when we allowed both utility and client contracts to roll over without reviewing them – we just didn’t have the manpower to assess things on a day-to-day basis.
“The solution to this was to find a more sophisticated, efficient long-term solution that would enable us to see the status of our contracts every day, in real time, and tell us when they were up for renewal. This would help us to cut unnecessary expenditure.
“The beauty of Contract Sentinel is that it does all the hard work for us, and it has actively saved us money. It alerts us when contracts of all types are up for renewal, so we can assess them in good time and decide whether to cancel or renew.
“The software also has a reporting feature which is very easy to understand and presented in a single-view format on the screen, so you can see every aspect of each contract and how they interrelate. This means we can view the true and current cost and performance of a contract at any time, making it easy for us to see how we can save or make money there too, and make informed business decisions.”
He concludes: “Contract Sentinel gives you back the control you need to run your operation with maximum efficiency, and prevents costly errors. This system is not just for large companies, it’s also ideal for smaller operations like ours where human resources and time are limited.”