Contracts negotiation

Once the successful bidder is selected, it is still possible to request corrective actions and additional terms through contract negotiation. There are occasionally situations where a contractual term cannot be negotiated with the first selection and the next candidate is offered the toll contract. Chapter 3, Mutual Agreements, Obligations, and Contract Considerations addresses this topic in more detail. 

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. 

Premium freight was addressed briefly in Part 2 Chapter 3 under Contract review, as it is at the contract negotiation stage that the criteria will be established as to what is premium freight. If you fail to make delivery by the planned means (the means agreed in the contract) you may have no alternative but to choose a faster way of getting the shipment to its intended destination. This may result in additional cost. It is this cost that the customer wishes you to monitor and record. 

The Chinese are not bashful about asking for commercial and technical presentations in Peking. Oftentimes, these days, the Chinese side may extend an unsolicited invitation to an American supplicant firm. If such visits result in contract negotiations, they are divided into technical and commercial parts. Only after the technical questions have been made clear, do the commercial negotiations begin. Such negotiations are in both parts arduous and difficult, but still quite agreeable and educational. 

A great many other subjects may be brought up during contract negotiations, but I would like to discuss just one more. Any contract, no matter how skillfully drafted, is subject to various interpretations. Some may be deliberate attempts to wring more out of the contract than was put in. More likely, there may be honest differences of opinion. A mechanism must be available for resolving problems in either case. 

As a consequence of OSC s responsibility for contract negotiations, PMCD s authority in the procurement process is diluted. Moreover, having OSC as a participant in the procurement process adds to the time needed for processing routine matters. 

A controversial issue is the ownership of IP arising from the cooperation between customer and supplier. The customer holds the position that all IPRs resulting from a joint project belong to him. His arguments are that (1) without his input there would have been no invention anyhow and (2) that he has paid for the development of the IP, either directly by funding the supplier s R D work or indirectly through the price that he pays for the product. The supplier maintains that IP is an essential prerequisite for her business. If she cannot advance her know-how, she will drop out of business sooner or later. Also, the customer would not have entrusted her with a project, if he had not been attracted by the supplier s know-how. These opposite views are a critical element in contract negotiations and can become a deal breaker. 

In fiscal 1979, DOE allocated approximately 43 million for hydrogen R D (Table I). In the coal conversion area the planned budget was 22.8 million, which is almost half of the 43 million the largest part of that 22.8 million was for building a pilot plant for producing hydrogen from coal. However, the plant was not built because of difficulties in contract negotiations and... 

This at-will relationship can be modified in two different ways. One is by statute, which will be discussed in detail later, and the other is by private contract between the hospital and the nurse. Although it is probably a rare practice in the field, hospitals and nurses can sign employment contracts that spell out the duties and responsibilities of the two parties, and which modify the typical at-will relationship. No doubt more common are contracts negotiated between unions representing the nurses and the hospital itself. Such contracts often spell out the terms and conditions of the job, including hours of work, limits on required overtime work, and disciplinary procedures to be followed if an employee fails to comply with the conditions in the contract. 

Workable definitions of EOR and lOR are necessary not just for improved communication, but also to recoverable reserves booking, contract negotiations, government incentives, taxation, and regulatory authorities when looking at fiscal issues (Stosur et al., 2003). The following sections summarize the existing definitions used in the petroleum industry and then propose this book s definitions of EOR and lOR. 

An important research project to support the cooperation on the level of business agreements is Negoisst (see [405, 406]) which drives electronic negotiations between potential contract partners. It uses a three-phase state model to represent the different phases and steps of a contract negotiation. Semantic models and technologies are used to integrate the informal (textual) representation of a contract and its formal (exact) conceptualization. This allows web- or email-based discussions to be based on the exact concepts, attributes, and values. It also enables the tracing of the final results and their intermediate steps. 

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