How to digitize your contract review process

What is a contract review?

If you haven’t come across this term before, a contract review is a formal acceptance of orders into your organization. Taking a few minutes to review key items can make a big difference to your on time delivery performance, customer satisfaction and profit margins.

If you feel that the delivery arm of your business struggles to meet customer requirements, then implementing a contract review process can make a huge difference.

In this article I am going to show you how you can quickly create a contract review process within PDCA Complete.

What goes into a contract review?

This is entirely dependant upon how your business operates, but let me give you some pointers.

What do you need in order to deliver your product or services?

• Knowledge of contractual obligations?
• Lead times and available capacity?
• Material / sub-contractor availability?
• Technical queries resolved?
• Administrative support?
• Delivery / despatch information?
• Quality and inspection plans?
• Additional safety controls?
• Environmental safeguards?

Brainstorm a list of checks, this will be the core of your contract review. (You can always edit it later!)

Setup PDCA Complete

This article is going to assume a few things:

• You have an account set up (free or premium).
• You have invited your team into the system.

If you haven’t done this, follow the links above and within a few minutes you’ll be ready to go!

Creating your contract review

From the main menu click on Workflows (1), then on the New button (2).

Create the workflow. Enter the Name for the workflow and a Description if required (3).

In a moment you will add the tasks and owners, but if you need to include additional Stakeholders (to be informed of progress automatically), add them here too (4).

Once you are ready, click on the Create button (5).

Using the add task icon (+) (6) enter the information of the task and save it (7). For each task required to complete the contract review, you will add in the following:

• Task name.
• Assigned to.
• Start After – this is the number of days after the process has been launched. 0 (zero) is the first day.
• Due After – how many days after the start of the process you want the task to be completed.

The Approved By field is optional, if you want additional sign off for a specific task.

A green disk icon will appear at the end of the row when you have entered the minimum information. Click this to save it into the main task list.

When you are ready to launch the workflow, click on the rocket icon (8).

The launch window appears. Change the Start Date and Last Start Date (9) to cover the date range of the contract review.

Review the tasks that have generated (10). If you need to correct any of the tasks, click on the X icon and edit the tasks using the green pencil icon, before launching again.

When you are ready to launch the tasks, click on the Create Tasks button (11).

The tasks will generate and appear in the relevant My Tasks pages for the team assigned to complete the contract review.

The screenshot below shows them queued on the My Tasks screen for the person that issued the workflow (12).

Next time you need to launch the contract review, you’d just enter the workflows section, locate this process and click on the rocket again.

PDCA Complete also has a feature to launch workflows on a recurring basis. So, for example, if you ran a contract review every other week you could launch all of the tasks in one go for a time period of your choice!

Get started today

If you don’t already have your free PDCA Complete account for your organization, then you can sign up here. There are a number of premium features you can access through a subscription. You can find out more about this via our Pricing page.

Also, we offer live demos. If you want to find out more about PDCA Complete and how it can help your organization then organize your demo here.