The Department for Work and Pensions relies on medical assessments to help its decision makers reach an appropriate decision on a customer's entitlement to a wide range of benefits. From April 2013, a new medical assessment will be introduced for Personal Independence Payment. A procurement competition is underway to appoint service providers for this. The Department's contractor for medical services, Atos Healthcare, completed 738,000 face-to-face medical assessments in 2011-12 and charged the Department £112.4 million. This performance review examines the Department's contract management and wider strategy for the supply of medical services, including the Department's contractual relationship with Atos Healthcare; the performance management of Atos Healthcare; the future contracting strategy. Amongst key findings, according to the performance data provided, is that Atos Healthcare has not routinely met all the service standards specified in the contract. This report makes a number of recommendations to strengthen existing governance arrangements; to improve performance monitoring and to strengthen the Department's commercial strategy

Globalization, increased economic and geopolitical uncertainty, technological advancements, and a rise in the number of regulations and legislations have led to a significant rise in the importance, volume, and complexity of modern contractual agreements. Yet, in spite of these profound changes, many organizations still manage the contracting process in a fragmented, manual, and ad-hoc manner, resulting in poor contract visibility, ineffective monitoring and management of contract compliance, and inadequate analysis of contract performance. The net effect of this has been a heightened interest in re-engineering and automation of Enterprise Contract Management (ECM) processes across industry sectors and geographies. Enterprise Contract Management: A Practical Guide to Successfully Implementing an ECM Solution addresses all the questions surrounding ECM, ECM solutions, and the project management, change management, and risk management considerations to ensure its successful implementation. This concise text will help your organization manage the challenges of the contract life cycle and the key success factors and pitfalls in a typical ECM solution. It is a must read for corporate executives, buyers, procurement and strategic sourcing specialists, contract administrators and procurement managers. There is currently no other book available on ECM solutions. All existing books on contract management focus on the legal aspects of contracts, but none describe the functions, features, capabilities of technology solutions that support ECM, nor do they explain the key considerations for ensuring a successful ECM solution implementation.

What Will This Book Do for You? This book provides a survival manual for anyone involved in the crafting, structuring, negotiating, supporting or managing contracts involving commercial transactions of goods, services or both. It blends the practical with general legal principles and highlights best practices for supply chain professionals and anyone else involved, directly or indirectly, with the generation or management of contracts from cradle-to-grave. Even commercially wise and sophisticated organizations can be untrained and unaware of certain gaps and traps in the management of their contracts. This book addresses those pitfalls and provides lessons learned and guidance that are not typically taught at the college or even graduate school level. Experience can be hard and expensive to come by and this book provides a concentrated dose of experience that immediately raises the reader's level of sophistication and awareness for gaps and traps while providing practical solutions to pitfalls that can haunt any organization. Left unchecked, these pitfalls can lead to dysfunction and confusion; both of which can be an expensive proposition in today's competitive and uncertain economic environment. Who Should Use this Book? Supply Chain Management Professionals, Risk Managers, Insurance Experts, Project Managers, Purchasing Agents, Contract Administrators, Executives and any business or technical professionals who are involved with developing, managing or implementing projects, purchases or any complex transaction or procurement where cost, schedule and scope certainty are important. What Does This Book Cover? This book covers how the relationship of the parties affects commercial transactions and addresses the importance of upholding the integrity of the process and the contract by understanding key supply chain best practices. The book focuses on contracting strategies and approaches including how to structure requests for proposals and instructions to bidders as well as key considerations in pricing and pricing adjustments, risk management tools and techniques, the importance of defining the deliverables and outcomes, negotiation strategies and techniques, negotiating warranties and remedies, applying leadership and influencing skills to the process, how to implement sound change management as well as capturing and applying past lessons learned. In addition, special attention is given to the importance of sound "kick off" and "close out", including termination for cause or convenience techniques and other best practices.

This second edition of Contracting for Services in State and Local Government Agencies provides state-of-the-art tools for best practice in the procurement of services at state and local levels, from initial stages through to completion. Including lively case studies and research conducted with state and local agencies across the United States, this book provides management advice and tips on compliance to reduce costs, select the best-qualified contractors, manage contractors’ performance, and prevent corruption and waste. Utilizing the results of new research in all fifty states, author William Sims Curry offers updated best-practice documents, methodologies, and templates including: a Request for Proposal (RFP), a scorecard for proposals to select the best-qualified contractor, a toolkit for meeting socioeconomic contracting goals without compromising price, quality, or on-time delivery, and a Model Services Contract (MSC). Special consideration is given to obtaining services and products in states of emergency. Several additional resources for practitioners are available online, including sample contracts and a straightforward, inexpensive tool for tracking contractors’ progress and cost management. The roadmap and templates contained in this book and available online to readers will prove essential to state and local government agency contracting professionals and other officials and employees called upon to participate in the drafting of solicitations, writing sole source justifications, writing scopes of work, serving on advance contract planning and source selection teams, recommending award of contracts, or assisting in the management of those contracts.

This ground-breaking title from the world s leading authority on contemporary contracting best practices, the IACCM (International Association for Contract and Commercial Management) delivers a lively and practical complete insight into the contracting process which is useful in both business and personal life. Contracts are the language of business, and this book gives readers the essentials that can make a difference to any deal, no matter how big or small. Designed for the non-contract business professional, this book takes project managers and other professionals through the basic process and gives them a road map to improved results, increased value, and successful outcomes In this book you ll find sensible guidance and approaches to ensure business success. Case studies showing you what can go wrong and what can go right -- bring theory into the real world. Checklists give confidence and enable you to be certain that you have asked and answered the right questions as you go through any deal. This real-world approach demonstrates the value of effective contracting. This is not dry, academic prose. It is compelling and dynamic advice and tools to manage business relationships for both buyers and sellers.