Enhancing a leading University’s contract management to increase supplier performance

The Situation

Our client is recognised internationally as a world-leading university. With this reputation, students, educators and researchers will expect that their buildings and facilities create a sense of place, provide a sense of community and support the educational and research objectives of the organisation.

A recent restructure within the property team has resulted in a step-change improvement in the way the university manages its buildings, facilities and service providers. This change also resulted in a newly formed and centralised contract management team.

The contract management team has subsequently developed contract management procedures, standard operating procedures and processes. The team was now seeking to align its contract management processes with better practice to ensure they are fit for purpose, including their robustness and effectiveness in delivering better supplier performance.

Our approach

Grosvenor held several workshops with the University’s internal team to map current processes and to discuss better practice improvements. As the workshops included a wide range of stakeholders from procurement, facilities management and the property team, we were able to co-design the future state, ensuring the processes were fit for purpose, streamlined and compliant with the University’s service delivery and legal obligations. We then used our Contract Management Better Practice Comparator to review the existing documentation, operating procedures and templates.

From this we reported back to the internal team on the identified better practice gaps, recommended improvements and agreed a roadmap for implementation.

The outcome

Our review found that the existing processes and documentation do not cover the full scope of the team’s responsibilities, that they are not aligned with available templates, systems and user guidance and that planning, and execution steps are often disjointed. As such the adoption rate of the contract management processes was poor, prone to error and likely not able to withstand an upcoming internal audit.

We delivered an implementation plan for our four core recommendations. The client was able to leverage our standard suite of contract management processes, documentation and templates. The University further adopted a new formal structure and escalation process and improved performance management for the team itself to ensure the changes are embedded.

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