Compliance, Commitments and Performance Management
How Can Upside Software Help?
Through effective and highly visible management of contracts and associated risk, compliance and performance, organizations can properly assess and more ably assume responsibility for their operations.
Advance alerts for required tasks and events
- UpsideLive's alert handler enables tracking and notification of a great number of data elements and activities and allows user definition of the following major elements:
- Data change events such as status changes, change of contract manager or any data element configured by the user.
- User definable audit logging. Any table in the system can be configured for audit logging of additions, deletions or changes to data.
- Time-based events such as contracts approaching renewal points, periodic monitoring, etc.
- User definable expression based alerts that allow things like invoice pricing exceeding contract rate by greater than X%.
- In addition to the above, the task and event alerts in UpsideLive allow the contract manager and/or the finance department to monitor the ongoing performance of the contract to ensure terms, conditions, and/or deliverables is met according to original expectations.
- Alerts can be set up by individual contract, type of contract, by department or organization, by contract value, by service provider, etc. with time limits that can escalate an action when not acted upon.
- Ensures that appropriate stakeholders are notified of upcoming events, pending deliverables, or compliance notices.
- Automatic reminders and notifications of various events such as monthly reports due, status reports, specific documentation being required at different points in time, etc. can be provided to various stakeholders.
- Establish outcomes for all scenarios relating to an event.
Automated, advanced email notification
- Each user can define their personal preferences for notifications. Options include:
- Immediate notifications as events occur.
- Summary notifications on a scheduled basis (i.e. every 2 hours, daily, weekly).
- Different schedules for different event types (i.e. immediate notification of a required approval, daily summary of documents to review).
- Distribution lists can be associated with specific documents or general lists can be applied to classes of documents. Similar to the groups in Microsoft Outlook, users are able to define groups of one or more email recipients and can assign the group(s) to be notified on particular events / workflow processes.
Risk management
- The ability to manage contract risk (and contract related risk) is a key feature in
UpsideLive providing a mechanism to identify, evaluate, track and manage risk events, drivers, and impacts.
- UpsideLive allows risk events to be identified including a text description of the event along with an estimated probability of occurrence and the estimated loss if the event were to occur (in time or dollars).
- For each risk event:
- One or more Event Drivers can be identified, recording of reasons why the event may occur.
- One or more Impacts can be identified, documenting potential outcomes if the event were to occur, each with an assigned probability.
- Each Impact can have one or more Impact Drivers which document the elements contributing to the loss if the event were to occur.
- A specific user will be assigned to the event; this is the individual responsible for managing the risk event and taking steps to reduce the probability of occurrence.
- A specific event can be assigned to a contract or a project, including customer defined projects.
- UpsideLive records details of actions taken to mitigate risk events and stores historic information on adjustments made to probability estimates.
- The system provides extensive reporting capabilities to provide stakeholders with an effective view of risks, supporting material, and associated mitigation plans.
Performance monitoring
- UpsideLive provides extensive performance monitoring and management functions including the ability to identify, evaluate, track, and manage Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and other criteria.
- Allows for performance monitoring goals such as volume levels, monetary levels, etc. to be established across the organization.
- Allows stakeholders to monitor various key indicators such as percentage levels met, ratings, the pass or fail of a specific business rule, or a wide range of other user defined conditions.
- Establish alerts to provide notification when performance conditions are not met, where there is a high risk of failure associated with a contract, or to identify vendors not meeting performance expectations.
- Attach specific ‘details’ that relate to a particular deliverable to forecast expenditures. For example, in a lease contract where payment terms are fixed, a Contract Manager can do a forecast for the term of the contract on planned monthly expenditures. This feature provides the ability to aggregate a number of different contracts and, as an example, see a forecast of all lease payments for the next three years across the organization.
- These combinations of different performance management tools enhance an
organization's ability to effectively manage the risk associated with a contract and provide adherence to corporate auditing policies.
- Performance conditions can drive escalation of notification and/or activity, and can even drive suspension of a contract or contractor (all contracts for the contractor).
- Performance criteria can be defined for a type of contract and will automatically be included in all contracts of that type. Criteria can also be defined at the contract level to define specific performance requirements for any contract.
- Reporting on vendor performance provides an organization with valuable management information.
- Ability to pull out strategic sourcing information for Procurement Managers to identify their best performing suppliers. This information can be based on specific commodities or particular services, and identify suppliers with the best price, quality, compliance to the terms of the contract, or other value adding components.
- The contractor performance report provides a concise view of a contractor’s performance across all contracts they have been a part of.
- The system also sports a graphical display of all Performance Metrics for a particular vendor/supplier. This is shown in the ‘Performance Tree’ view. This maximizes the visibility of performance issues as they develop and provides an easy link to drill down to the details of the issue.
Compliance monitoring
- Establish Compliance Items for specific aspects of the contract. This is handled through the compliance monitoring functionality:
- Requirements such as the need for the vendor to validate that they have renewed their annual insurance can be flagged as a Compliance Item. Once identified on the contract, a notification is sent to the Contract Manger that documentation must be received by the vendor at certain points in time during the life of the contract.
- Compliance Items can take many forms. These can be items like a checklist of items that must be completed before the contract can be effective, minimum or maximum levels of products/services, etc.
- Compliance Items can be used as approval conditions that must be met prior to the contact being approved and issued.
- Reporting on Compliance Items can be shown at a contract level, a customer/ supplier level, across the organization, for a particular commodity or spend, etc.
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