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Environmental & Risk Management / Compliance Management / Contract Manager

Contract Manager

Many companies outsource facility work under a contract to the providing vendor. Facility work is often outsourced because tasks need specially trained and certified professionals. For example, your company might have contracts for maintaining and inspecting HVAC equipment, fume hoods, emergency eyewash stations, bio-safety cabinets, and so on. A single missed task or renewal date can have severe consequences in terms of life safety and regulatory penalties.

Accordingly, you need to carefully manage contracts with vendors and ensure that the work that the contractors do is executed correctly and on time. Outsourced work that is not correctly completed can result in non-compliance with regulations. For example, if you outsource the maintenance of elevators and the vendor does not fulfill the terms of the contract, you could be at risk for not adhering to safety regulations and could put the elevators passengers at risk.

Using ARCHIBUS, contract managers can:

• Model all aspects of a contract in a consistent, ordered structure, including:
  • Vendor contract and responsible person
  • specific terms of the contract, including satisfaction criteria and ongoing level of compliance
  • locations, assets, and organizations serviced
  • regulatory concerns related to the contract
  • the ARCHIBUS project that is funding the contract
  • cost commitments, including fixed costs and labor rates, per contract and per asset or location, including multi-currency and VAT support
• Store versioned copies of contract documents in the enterprise database
• Maintain communication logs of vendor contacts
• Schedule reminders and notifications for contract-related activities, such as review and renewal dates.
• Track the work history of fulfilling the contract.
• Monitor contract violations and their costs.
• Define questionnaires and schedule inspections (surveys) of contractors' work. Inspecting the completed work is important for:
  • evaluating the contracted vendor's performance: is the contractor fulfilling the contract? am I getting what I pay for?
  • ensuring that you meet compliance regulations.

ARCHIBUS models contracts using a regulation--contract--contract term hierarchy, which uses the same tables as the regulation--compliance program--requirement hierarchy used throughout the rest of the Compliance Management application. These tables are: Regulations (regulation), Compliance Programs and Contracts (regprogram), and Requirements (regrequirement).

As with compliance programs and requirements, you can model internal goals (initiatives) in the Regulations tables if an area of concern is not tied to a specific, formal regulation. For example, you might have a goal to ensure a clean working environment; this can be entered in the Regulations table. You can then model the associated contracts and contract terms.

Note: The Contract Manager process uses some of the same views as the Compliance Program Manager process. The contract views have a permanent restriction such that they only show records related to contracts (WHERE regprogram.is_contract = 1). When working with the Contract Manager process, be aware that the views show only records related to contracts or contract terms. The exception is the Contract Manager / Define Questionnaires task which presents questionnaires for both contract terms and requirements.

Tasks within other Compliance Management processes may show both compliance programs and contracts, or only compliance programs. For information, see Working with Contracts and Compliance Programs Together.

Process

1. Review these concepts:
   • Concept: Determining How to Implement ARCHIBUS Contract Management at your Site
   • Concept: Contracts and On Demand and Preventive Maintenance SLAs
2. Enter regulations.
3. Enter contracts.
4. Enter the terms of a contract.
5. Define and generate scheduled events for contract terms so that you can track the actions that need to be executed to achieve the contract term.
   • You can then manage and edit the events using the Compliance Program Manager / Compliance Event Management / Schedule Compliance Event and related tasks.
   • See Compliance Event Management: Overview.
6. As necessary, add locations, documents, notifications, and communication logs to a contract or contract term. See:
   • Add Notifications, Locations, Documents, and Communication Logs to Contracts (Manage Contracts task)
   • Add Notifications, Locations, Documents, and Communication Logs to Contract Terms (Manage Contract Terms task)
   • Manage this data using the tasks of the Environmental & Risk Management / Compliance Management / Compliance Program Manager process.
7. Enter costs for contracts and contract terms.
8. If your site uses the On Demand and Preventive Maintenance applications, an SLA manager can associate each regulatory requirement or contract term with a specific SLA and PM Schedule. With this connection, the regulation, contract, and terms can be tied to On Demand and PM work requests and PM Schedule Dates. See Associating Compliance Service Contracts with SLAs
9. Verify that contracted work was completed by developing survey questionnaires and periodically performing field surveys using either:
   • the Compliance Surveys mobile app
   • the Web Central views on a tablet or laptop
10. As violations of the contract occur, enter contract violations and the resulting penalties and fees you are assessed.

11. Review the status of all the work that is related to a compliance contract using the Work Status Reports process.

12. Analyze contract costs, violations, work history, work evaluations, and so on with contract management reports and operation reports.