Reference no: EM132578046
Developing Contracts in Procurement and Supply
Your Executive Summary focused immediately on furniture and installations where you discussed the importance of the requisitioning process and ordering the necessary furniture for each department. Next time round, an Executive Summary needs to identify conclusions (ie what your found) and high-level recommendations (what you would recommend to change).
In your introduction you discussed the very significant size and scale of the Khalifa University with 12,000 students and interested stakeholders and where operations (including procurement) has been centralised. You described the wide variety and types of furniture within the category of focus and that selection of suppliers can be complex and challenging with multiple considerations other than price (eg quality, durability etc).
On p4 you discussed risks of poor quality and sustainability and listed on p5 the typical life span you look for across different types of furniture as well as sustainability credentials. Crucially however you did not show any clauses from your standard purchase agreements which would provide protection to Khalifa University on quality (eg goods shall be fit for purpose, of reasonable quality, properly fire tested and certified and so on). You could have also shown clauses that describe Khalifa University's rights if products received are of sub-standard (eg terminate contract, refusal to pay etc).
On p6 you identified a number of good questions which should be asked when procuring furniture and all of these were valid. The issue however is that these are selection criteria as opposed to contractual clauses which help protect Khalifa University's position.
On p7, again there were multiple examples of good criteria which could be used to help procure the furniture (eg CO2 footprint, fabric choices, transportation, eco-labelling, etc). However you needed to show these requirements more contractually and how clauses would link to these agreements.
On p8 you discussed timeliness and that on occasions, Khalifa University may allow an extension of time. However here you could have pulled a clause extract into your answer from your standard terms to show for example refusal or cancellation rights if the shipment of furniture is late or liquidated damage provisions which would compensate for late delivery.
You identified a number of factors on bottom p8 and p9 which can interrupt the supply chain. Essentially these were a mix of PESTLE or macro-environmental factors and internal weaknesses which need to be mitigated by contractual provisions (eg unethical practices, quality, cost, battle of the forms etc). For each of these you could again have included a clause to support how the risks are mitigated.
Another example of this were the supply chain inclement weather, disasters etc which would normally be covered by a Force Majeure clause.
There was a final section around importance of quality to Khalifa University which was clear but this did not address once more how the risks are mitigate contractually.
Your recommendations needed to be better set out and bullet pointed around the need to fit furniture choices to available budget for example. There were also comments such as supplier relationships being key in selecting furniture which could be debated ethically.
Conclusions were around importance of planning the purchase of furniture and promoting quality at a reasonable cost.
Overall the positive of the assignment response was that you had selected a category of focus being furniture and your content had moved away from selection criteria and focused much more on quality, risk etc. However you needed much greater focus on how performance is monitored.