Contract acquisition

Contract review is but one of the tasks in the contract acquisition process. These are marketing, prospect acquisition, tendering, contract negotiation, contract award, and then contract review. However, in a sales situation, you may simply have a catalog of products and services and a sales office taking orders over the telephone or over the counter. The contract review element of this operation takes a few seconds while you determine if you can supply the item requested. In an organization that produces products to specific customer requirements you may in fact carry out all the tasks in the contract acquisition process. Rather than isolate the contract review task and produce a procedure for this, your business may benefit more from a procedure or series of procedures that covers the contract acquisition process as a whole. 

Your contract acquisition procedures need to define as appropriate ... 

Customers may have specific requirements that apply to the contract acquisition processes, such as limitation on profit, special quotation forms, validity of quotation, etc. VDA 6.1, for example, has a requirement for the marketing function to be incorporated into the operational organization. 

Today, the system safety process is still used extensively by the various military organizations within the Department of Defense, as well as by many other federal agencies such as NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Department of Energy. In most cases, it is a required element of primary concern in the federal agency contract acquisition process. 

Therefore, Part I of this text focused primarily on the development of system safety, its military connections, the importance of including system safety requirements in contract acquisitions, the criticality of obtaining management commitment in support of the system safety effort, the process of risk analysis and assessment, probability theory and statistical analysis as they relate to system safety, and— perhaps of most value— how the fundamental principles of system safety are closely related to those of occupational safety and health management. 

If another company purchases a toller company in the midst of an ongoing contract, several questions need to be asked. Foremost for the client company is the question of how the acquisition will affect process safety and environmental concerns. 

Using MRI as a substitute for X-ray tomography is only the first of what are many medical applications. More lie on the horizon. If, for example, the rate of data acquisition could be increased, then it would become possible to make the leap from the equivalent of still photographs to motion pictures. One could watch the inside of the body as it works— see the heart beat, see the lungs expand and contract—rather than merely examine the structure of an organ. 

If the system is modest and stand-alone (perhaps based on a small minicomputer or super microcomputer), only the acquisition cost may be significant. If the system needed is a large and expensive one (such as would be based on a mainframe or super minicomputer) and if it requires specially prepared and/or air conditioned facilities, much cable installation and/or on-going service contracts, then all cost factors may require consideration. 

Customer Service and Service Contracts It is important to choose a vendor that has a good customer service track record. Contact other laboratory directors and supervisors to ascertain their experience with the vendors that service their laboratories. Also, the cost of a service contract will need to be factored into the laboratory operating budget after the acquisition of an automated staining platform. 

Additionally, these diversifications may represent sources of distraction for senior management, which can be exacerbated if the companies are publicly traded. A recent example is the diversification of the contract service organization aaiPharma (Wilmington, NC, U.S.A.) into a specialty pharmaceutical manufacturer. Quintiles (Research Triangle Park, NC, U.S.A.) also diversified aggressively in the 1990s and the acquisition of a patient billing company was problematic. 

Starr, J. A. C MacMillan, I. C. 1990. Resource cooptation and social contracting resource acquisition strategies for new ventures. Strategic Management Journal, 11 79-92. 

The present contract calls for reimbursement of all allowable expenses, excluding contractor costs disallowed by the federal acquisition regulations, such as business development costs. A small base fee was negotiated as profit. The disallowed expenses must be covered by the base fee. The contractor receives a base fee during execution of the contract, and only in the most unusual circumstances is any part of this fee denied. An additional 3 percent of the contract value is set aside as an incentive fee that can be earned by superior performance. The federal acquisition regulations that govern procurement and acquisition procedures undertaken with federal funds are applicable to both materiel and contract services for closure of JACADS... 

AgC104 or Ph3C+ BFi did not succeed, presumably because the acquisition of a positive charge by the platinum results in a contraction of its d-orbitals disfavouring olefin coordination. The product isolated corresponds to the formulation [PtBr(L)H20]+ CIO4, a square planar Pt(II) species containing the phosphine coordinated in a bidentate configuration. 

The CDC in the United States invites bids for particular vaccines in a winner-take-all competition (Salkever and Frank 1996). Multiple contracts are sometimes awarded, usually because there is clear evidence that a single bidder would not be able to produce sufficient quantity to meet the expected purchase level however, during the period Salkever and Frank studied (before VFC), there were few bidders in CDC vaccine auctions. Thus, although the bidding process could be modified to deal with acquisition of particular vaccines, such as for flu, it seems unlikely that minor modifications could yield more than minor improvements. 

This sale and back-lease model is applied by many other pharmaceutical companies. It enables the company to dispose of assets without being forced to lay off employees. The net effect for the industry as a whole is that statistically, the share of outsourcing is increasing. However, the problem of underutilized capacity persists. For a hne-chemical company, the acquisition of an API plant from a pharma company is problematic. Once the supply contract, offered by the pharma company as an incentive for the acquisition, expires, the problem arises as to what the capacity should be used for. This is all the more the case as the plants usually are designed to manufacture just one product and therefore are not truly multipurpose. Last but not least, the plants have been run as cost centers and the implementation of a lean production... 

Ima e acquisition. Image analysis of heart contractions is performed using a Hamamatsu EM-CCD digital camera mounted... 

Acquiring products has a number of implications beyond those of taking a licence. When a company acquires a product it also acquires any and all liabilities already associated with that product. These liabilities may include past damages inflicted on patients, environmental impacts and contingent issues associated with third-party contracts. Conversely, the value represented in the acquisition of a product lies in obtaining the full value from its revenue streams and having full control of any development issues. 

---