Greg Tharp, who has written excellent articles for us recently, offers this two-part series about cost recovery for commercial item contracts.  He starts with this question…

What follows is an update of Arnaud Cervera’s article that was originally published March 14, 2020, on LinkedIn. We preface his piece with an endorsement from Tim Cummins, President of IACCM, who stated recently,

“This is an excellent article and absolutely hits the right points on the combination of simplification and the use of artificial intelligence (AI.) I’d like to suggest there are two additional issues that need to be addressed to make this change fast and effective.

1. Economics- IACCM has been spending time (and using AI) to analyze the powerful business case - not only within individual organizations, but also now in the context of national economies.

2. Standards - For benefits to be sustainable, we should avoid the mistake of replacing one art form (individual approaches to design and drafting) with another. There is a growing army of ‘design specialists’, each with their own view of how it should be done. Imagine if accountants took a similar view to producing accounts - we would finish up with replacing one form of chaos with another.

So again, IACCM has been working to create a publicly available ‘design library’. It’s also worth mentioning that the legal authorities which oversee court and dispute systems need to come on board with this - so we are working on that too.” - Tim Cummins

This is the third in a series of articles on business relationships, triggered by the coronavirus (COVID-19) and economic crisis, but the recommendations hold true well beyond both of those challenges.