Potential issues
- The expected benefits of your business relationship are not being realised
- Your key stakeholders are worried about whether major contracts represent value to the business and risks are controlled effectively
- You feel that, post contract, the advertising agency is seeking to maximise their margin
- You are finding it difficult to create and sustain trust between you and your third parties
- Functional protectionism means you are not getting the truth about cost from your third parties
- Scope creep, delivery and quality failures, poor or perverse incentives, bad planning and demand management, ill-informed buying, deliberate contract manipulation and miscommunication can all be causes of value erosion.
How we can support you
We can help you get better value from contracts and transactions with third parties by:
- Helping you to understand the real cost drivers and true cost implications of management decisions
- Implementing effective contract deployment – you signed a great deal but is the business really getting the benefit?
- Reviewing contract structures to ensure reward and pricing mechanisms fit the service or product and are driving the right behaviour
- Simplifying by removing unreliable evidence, inadequate knowledge or unnecessary complexity that may hamper decision making
- Billing compliance and invoice error recovery services
- By understanding the commercial implications of your day-to-day transactions we can develop a clear picture of what is happening in your business, and how contracts and services are being operated.
Our four-phase approach helps you understand and validate your value drivers through:
- Value tracking - understand the real procurement decisions and drivers; determine and identify key elements of value; and assess contract strategy, charge regime and service congruity
- Assessment of processes and decisions - commercial, operational and financial aspects
- Spend audits - analytical review of invoices, job sheets, timesheets and source documents
- Contract compliance - review of whether contract and billing terms are being complied with
- We then identify where value is being lost and provide pragmatic advice on how to you can capture value and savings
We have experience performing the following services both locally and internationally:
- On-site audits or reviews of your partner, focusing on contract compliance and the processes for monitoring compliance
- Assistance with contract enforcement programs including best business practices; strategies for managing and monitoring; compliance programmes for advertising contracts and pricing agreements; and forensic-based advertising contracts examinations.
- Dispute Resolution including negotiation, litigation, arbitration, damage calculations and expert witness testimony
- Drafting of royalty and other financial provisions in agreements
- Assessment of the policies and control procedures used to monitor your alliances along with recommended improvements.
Benefits realized by our clients:
- Accurate payment of costs
- Compliance to key terms
- Fair contract interpretations
- Better internal controls
- Improved accountability and transparency
- Minimized global business culture / foreign language misunderstandings
- Improved business relations
- Improved quality of future agreements