Contracts Purchasing Law, Terms & Conditions

Program Summary

This seminar will cover the purchasing contract as a means of balancing risk and managing TCO within corporations. The assertion will be made that purchasing agents need to have core contract expertise, and that overreliance on the legal department can be counterproductive for the purchasing professional, from a time and results perspective – which results in career and income stagnation. Students will be given the skills to understand the meaning of all major standard contract clauses and be able to negotiate changes to their benefit and to be able to best capture the agreement between parties, and how to anticipate, recognize, and respond to supplier contract breaches. Purchasing professionals will learn how to slash cycle time associated with negotiating contracts, how to ensure greater compliance to corporate standard Ts and Cs by suppliers, how to prevent suppliers from red- lining contracts with their modifications, how to write contracts in such a way as to prevent supplier excursions instead of reacting to them, and how to have custom remedies already in place in the event an excursion does take place. Students will also learn how to use the contract as an extremely powerful and valuable tool to achieve lowest TCO in supplier negotiations. Students will also become far less reliant on the legal department and will learn that a legal approved contract may still be a terrible deal for the business. By taking control of the contract process, attendees will strike better agreements that deliver better results in a much shorter amount of time. These agreements will be for PERFORMANCE RESULTS (whereby the supplier is responsible for delivering results) instead of simply contracting for goods and services (when you buy goods and services, YOU own the results, not the supplier). Students will ultimately develop a much greater comfort and familiarity level with contracts and will stop using them as “seatbelts” in the case of an accident and will start using them as a value added tool that saves them time, money, and delivers far better supplier performance.

Program Payback

• Conquer your fear of contracts and have the contract become your greatest ally
• Learn why putting contracts in place for goods and services is a mistake (you own the results) and learn how to instead put contracts in place for performance results (supplier owns the results)
• Learn why a contract that is approved by the legal department may still cause you endless problems and what you need to do to avoid that
• Learn how to slash cycle time on contracts that do need to go to the legal department and how to handle many of the issues on your own without their involvement.
• Learn the meaning behind all the main contract clauses in goods and services contracts and how to modify them to your benefit
• Learn the difference between common law for services and the uniform commercial code equivalent for goods in your region.
• Learn how and when to use CISG and UNIDROIT laws for your contracts.
• Learn a powerful secret technique to slash contract negotiation cycle time by 75% or more.
• Learn how to prevent suppliers from marking up your contracts.
• Learn how to recognize bad contract terms and change them to be to your benefit.
• For each contract term, learn what the associated risk level is, what the supplier’s expected position is, and what your counter position should be.
• Recognize exactly how and where TCO can be hidden in contract terms and how to capture their value.
• Learn how to customize and write contracts that generate breakthrough TCO results, putting your career and your income on the fast track for success.

Who Should Attend?

Buyers , Purchasing Planners, Commodity Specialists/Managers, Supplier Managers, Purchasing Supervisors/Managers, Purchasing Directors, Supply Line Managers, contract Managers, Supply Chain Specialists/Managers, Business partners of the purchasing department (customers, finance, etc) Anyone who aspires to work in purchasing, Sales professionals who wish to better understand purchasing strategies of their customers