contract management
Every manufacturer has them. They are a quintessential component of ongoing support and advanced hardware replacement that every IT department needs. Maintenance contracts from the manufacturer are a necessary component of any organization’s business continuance. But along with all the benefits of these mechanisms comes a plethora of hassles for most companies.
Ideally, organizations would have a minimum number of contracts from each manufacturer, with all products sharing a common renewal date. However, the dedication needed to achieve and maintain this Zen-like state of contract renewal is not prevalent among resellers. In fact, TBL has found it common for many organizations to have a contract number for every new purchase, with individual one-year periods of coverage starting from every new purchase date. At best, this results in frequent renewal requests from various resellers multiple times a year that are all but impossible to budget for. At worst, some portion of these multiple annual renewals falls through the cracks and critical system components are left exposed without coverage – a state only realized when the coverage they are missing is needed to remedy an unexpected outage. This continual cycle of multiple purchases and multiple renewals ultimately leads to inconsistent coverage and lost confidence that these contracts provide appropriate coverage, and a lack of faith that the company is not also paying to cover obsolete or discontinued devices.
At TBL, we are stewards of the contracts our clients entrust us to manage on their behalf. A Contract Remediation project begins with TBL inventorying all current products in production and reconciling them against the current records of that client’s contracts. A plan is developed to consolidate duplicate contract types into singular master contracts by type, with all items across all contracts synchronized to simultaneously co-terminate coverage. For clients enlisted in our Ongoing Support, TBL tracks every item on every contract via our proprietary salesforce.com, delivering this data directly to their Customer Support Portal. Displaying the details of all contracts we manage, TBL’s Customer Support Portal is our guarantee to clients that we are vanguards of their best interests.
The key to maintaining well-planned contract management is how new purchases are integrated into the existing contract scheme. At TBL, we can add coverage to a client’s contracts for products they purchase from us, as well as for products they may decide to purchase elsewhere. Either way, new items are added onto an existing contract number – not by creating a new one – and the initial coverage period will be synced with the same renewal cycle that all other items on the contracts already share. The benefit – our clients only have to think about contract renewals one day each year.
TBL can make your contract management easier than it has ever been before, giving you the confidence that your contract coverage aligns with your business continuance needs.