Case Study: Contract Development & Negotiation
Successfully developed and deployed strategy needed to be expanded to South Africa…
Background
- Having been engaged to develop and deploy a work area recovery strategy for a UK headquartered international bank, C7 Consulting was asked to expand the strategy to encompass their South African division
- Local provision of service was becoming increasingly important, but expertise on the ground was in short supply
- Having constructed and negotiated the UK contract, C7 Consulting were well placed to assist
Approach
- In developing the original UK based contract, C7 Consulting had ensured sufficient flexibility that it could be utilised for all of the multinational’s divisions
- Further, if the same supplier was utilised additional cost efficiencies and discount structures were already embedded to ensure competitiveness
- Whilst the original contract could be used as a template, it was essential to ensure that business requirements were well enough aligned to ensure suitability
- A rapid 2 week process was therefore initiated to confirm requirements and to understand any local regulations and nuances that may impact proceedings (C7 Consulting never having operated from South Africa previously)
- With suitability confirmed, C7 Consulting then employed its proven approach to service procurement
- ITT (Invitiation to Tender) created to sound out the local market and ensure sufficient interest in providing service
- RFP (Request For Proposal) created, using the original UK contract to generate its structure, to ensure a total objective assessment of offerings could be made whilst allowing bidders sufficient scope for innovation
- RFP process run to determine the best placed vendor to provide the service, including workshops and “beauty parades” to allow both objective and subjective elements to be formally assessed
- Contract negotiations run with one primary vendor, with a secondary vendor kept warm until negotiations were successfully concluded
- Board level presentations of the contract ahead of signature to ensure commitment at the highest level in the organisation, and full understanding of the arrangement to be entered into
- In the course of execution, C7 Consulting made sure not to operate in isolation, and leveraged key client departments through fostering very close working relationships to ensure all facets were adequately covered, including
- Local BCM team – implicit knowledge transfer of service details
- Regional and Global senior management – regularly appraised of progress and the key conduit for ensuring requirements were accepted and fully aligned with business strategy
- Legal Counsel – translation of a UK originated contract into one fully accommodating local laws and regulations
- Finance – assistance in running cost and budget simulations/scenarios
- HR – tacit confirmation that any resourcing issues surfaced during service on-boarding could be predicted and planned for
Outcome
- 6 months after commencing the engagament, the South African division signed a contract extension with the UK service provider
- Additional benefits were negotiated into the contract over and above those originally negotiated by C7 Consulting
- Further cost breaks for this contract
- Additional aggressive discounts for any subsequent roll out
- Increased flexibility allowing service expansion and contraction to be assessed and handle on a global basis
- All of this with a vendor who the bank had found difficult to receive competitive pricing on in previous dealings, to the extent that this contract was also used to provide leverage on additional unrelated deals
- C7 Consulting continued to provide remote assistance, and core UK client team members were able to run the majority of the successful service deployment having been guided through the UK deployment
To find out more details about this case study, other examples of C7 Consulting’s capabilities on contract negotiation or to find out more about the company in general, please contact us via our contact page.
