As part of a Procurement Project there is often the need for the “Contract”. It is funny how in a lot of contracts, clauses relating to time of delivery and execution of duties are included and these are invariably accompanied by penalties, dire warnings, etc should the supplier not adhere to the time lines.
If the contract relates to non-business critical goods and services, this is a waste of time, ink, clauses and paper. We know that a lot of times, for non-business critical goods and services, the operations guys will work around the non-delivery or “service failure” with the supplier and come up with a solution for both of them. Sometimes, these contractual clauses are crafted at a certain time in a business’ reality and the business has moved on, but the contract had not been updated to reflect the new ways of working.
I have reviewed and negotiated contracts running into the hundreds of pages, but knew that once the papers had been signed, the contract will be placed in a draw to gather dust because unless something drastic happens, that contract will not see the light of day again. If you look back to contracts crafted three years ago and observe how those contracts are implemented by the supplier and the business in the day-to-day, then you will notice stark differences because it is people running the business and not a piece of paper.
I am not advocating doing away with contracts altogether, just saying that we need to think twice before committing irrelevant clauses to a contract.
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