The following article, reprinted by permission from the author, originally published Sep 7, 2018 on the Elevate Services’ website.  What follows surrounds why Craig Conte makes this critical point:  

A recent Delaware supreme court holding might motivate contract drafters to define the term for themselves

If your client is going to contractually commit to using "commercially rea­son­able ef­forts" to do something — but expects that obligation to require some­thing less than “all reasonable efforts” — then you’ll want to make the client's expectation clear in the contract language itself. Otherwise, if a court were to follow a recent trend in Delaware case law, the court might judge your client's performance against an all-reasonable-efforts standard.

Think about the last time you were a customer in your personal life.  Did you expect to be treated a certain way?  Did you expect certain standards to be met?  Chances are that you did and, if so, you were probably right.  The same is true when negotiating contracts for your company. 

A major finding of a recent McKinsey¹research paper Contracting for Performance – unlocking additional value reveals that most contracts lack basic elements that could enable better vendor performance and cost savings.

Financial Technology, better known these days by its blended name ‘FinTech,’ describes innovative technology in the financial sector. Many FinTech companies are disrupters in the consumer area (think PayPal or Venmo), but recently, an array of FinTechs focused on business-to-business (B2B) transactions have emerged.¹

Imagine seeking key data in your legacy contracts, but you lack technology solutions to pull out information you need to make best decisions, find revenue, reduce risk, and ensure compliance. 

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not turbulence itself, but to act with yesterday’s logic” – Peter Drucker

Investment – Demystifying Emerging Technologies with Andy Daws, Co-founder and Chief Customer Officer, Kim Technologies and Wendy Lawson, Senior Director, Member Services & Technology, IACCM.

In the following article, Dr Sara Cullen highlights some common realities with contracts - such as the fact few people read them, few people use them and many times they are subject to misinterpretation. Sara suggests we confront these realities and take a different approach to forming and documenting agreement.

In this article, author Julien Nadaud tells how to strengthen your procurement strategies and make them easier with just one word: agile. He lays the basic groundwork to rebuild your present agile procurement strategies.   And he concludes by summarizing two case studies surrounding specific examples of agility in action.  For both these companies, procurement agility made all the difference…