Contract acquisition process

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. 

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. 

System safety must be instituted into the facility and product acquisition process (including retrofitting and minor modifications). This section delineates the system safety milestones and safety products in the procurement process. This section should describe how the general procurement process works and how systan safety should be involved in this process. For example, the safety organization should make sure that safety requirements are part of the procurement tendering process and weU defined for bidders and vendors. Poor safety requirements definition has led not just to contract disputes but more importantly has many times led to poor safety management and ultimately to contributing to accidents. 

Material acquisition, processing, and storage. Vendor relationships including certification. Component engineering. Contracting, financing of suppliers. 

A contract is a legal agreement between two or more competent parties. In the systems acquisition process, a contract is typically between the government and a contractor, whereby the contractor develops and produces a product or system for the government. In addition to specified performance requirements, contract requirements include those requirements defined in the statement of work (SOW) specifications, standards, and related documents the Contract Data Requirements List (CDRL) management systems and contract terms and conditions. 

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. 

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. 

Acquisition cost of the system itself can be significant, but it represents, in many cases, only a relatively small percent of the total system cost over time. Many factors in addition to the acquisition cost of the system need to be considered, such as the costs of software updates, hardware maintenance, service contracts, and claims processing (Lewis, Albrant, and Hagel, 2002). Table 6-2 provides a checklist of items that a pharmacy should consider when selecting software and software vendors (Felkey and Fox, 2003b). 

The need for detailed and accurate specifications has increased with the advent of globalisation in the textiles and apparel industry. Specifications control the acquisition of materials and the production process to some extent, and will determine the performance characteristics of the final product. Specifications are used to describe a product, develop product consistency and negotiate sales contracts. Developing realistic specifications enhances the supplier—manufacturer relationship. 

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