Managing Federal Government Contracts requires a lot of information. Often, GovCon organizations have their contract information spread across a number of sources. This makes it a) difficult to pull it all together and b) very difficult to pull it together in real time to see where things stand. As a result, there is no way to be sure that everyone is working “off the same page”.
The challenge comes to the surface when you are asked for a Contract Brief. It may be for internal uses or in support of an external need such as for an Agency or DCAA audit. With information spread across many sources, someone will have to manually pull this information together. This will take time. And, by the time you have it together, the information could have changed.
However, if you have a formal, GovCon-specific contract management system then it should be able to provide a Federal Contract Brief in an instant. What you can get in that instant, in your Contract Brief, will tell you the scope of what information is available in your system. In effect, it is a “Litmus Test” for what is there.
What is in a Contract Brief
It can depend on the use. However, there is a core set of information. The R3 Contract Management system has a standard Contract Brief. It is available in an instant and presented digitally. The top of the Contract Brief is shown below.
Here is a listing of the sections of the R3 standard Contract Brief:
- Contract meta-data (like above)
- Contract Dates
- Contract Onramp Process Approvals
- Contract descriptive summary
- Contract financial information
- Contract and contact addressing information
- FAR/DFAR clauses and Provisions
- Closeout Checklist
- Contract Documents Listing
- Contract Modification table
- Subcontractors
- CLINs Table
- Contract Deliverables Table
- Action Items – for Contract Deliverables and other purposes
- Collaborative Comments
Most of these elements would be required for external use. Some such as the last 3 in the list, Contract Deliverables Table, Action Items and Collaborative Comments, are more for internal use. With R3, customers can have contract briefs of different types. Some may have less or more information or be formatted differently. They are all available in an instant.
Benefits of a Digital Contract Brief
The most obvious benefit of a digital contract brief from a system is that the information is instantly available and real time. This saves the time of having to pull it together. It also means that everyone is working with the same information. It represents a single source of truth.
With R3’s Contract Brief, certain sections are also interactive for drill-down. You can click on items to pop-up additional information. For example, if you were looking at Modifications you can click to actually see the Modification documents and activity. Below is a screenshot of the sections for Customer Documents (that you can open) and Modifications (that you can drill-down into).
And, with this information at your fingertips you can do the following:
- Print – You can print the Contract Brief to paper.
- PDF – You can print it to a PDF document.
- Copy content – You can copy all or sections of the Contract Brief into other desktop applications such as Excel or Word or into a separate form.
Fundamentally, when you think about what a GovCon contract management system should do for you, you can start with what is available for their Contract Briefs. It gives you a quick sense of the scope of the system.
To see the R3 Contract Management system in action, just request a personal demonstration.