WHAT DOES A CONTRACT DO?
Published: Jun 2, 2025 - The Contract Professional manages contract lifecycle activities including drafting, negotiation, and execution across diverse industries. This role ensures compliance with legal requirements, organizational policies, and risk mitigation strategies. The position also supports cross-functional teams by providing contract interpretation and resolution of contractual issues.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Contract
1. Contract Administrator Overview
- Invoice Processing: Coordinates invoice processing with actual work performed.
- Contractor Management: Manages contractor relationships.
- Invoice Entry: Inputs invoices into a database for review and approval.
- Compliance Support: Supplies safety and compliance information for contract and project oversight.
- Records Oversight: Oversees record management and contract tracking systems.
- Accrual Support: Supports accrual efforts companywide.
- Problem Solving: Recommends methods, approaches, and tactics to resolve problems and obtain solutions.
- Team Collaboration: Works as a team to build functional expertise.
- Contract Tracking: Transmits and tracks contract documents to suppliers and client management.
- Invoice Verification: Verifies insurance, receives and reviews contract invoices and coordinates payment authorization, and maintains project and vendor files.
- Diversity Compliance: Assists in the efforts to ensure the attainment of the company's supplier diversity goals.
2. Contract Analyst Job Description
- Customer Service: Provide excellent customer service.
- Monitoring Development: Assist in developing annual monitoring plans and methods for the implementation of those plans.
- Departmental Support: Provide backup and support to departmental functions, assisting with accounts payable activities and accounts receivable.
- Contractor Monitoring: Monitor and analyze contractors’ performance and fiscal procedures to ensure compliance with contractual requirements, federal, state, and local regulations, as well as internal policies.
- Policy Advising: Advise management of significant problems or needed policies and practices to avoid operational deficiencies.
- Financial Collaboration: Collaborate with staff throughout the system in assisting with financial-related inquiries or problems.
- Audit Preparation: Assist management in the preparation of support work papers for annual external audit, state and federal monitoring, and audits by other grantor/donor agencies.
- Policy Development: Participate in the development of financial and programmatic policies and procedures, suggesting enhancements designed to augment the operations of the department.
- Compliance Monitoring: Perform on-site monitoring to assess compliance with the contract, regulations, state and federal policies, program quality, and overall effectiveness.
- Project Collaboration: Collaborate on departmental initiatives and projects, performing special reviews and analyses, and providing detailed and accurate reports.
- Data Integrity: Ensure the integrity of the financial data being entered into the accounting system and that it is compliant with federal, state, and local government accounting standards.
- Confidentiality Management: Discern highly confidential materials and documents.
3. Contract Associate Duties
- Contract Preparation: Oversees and prepares contract documents from the initial stages through execution.
- Legal Compliance: Ensures contracts have state-required legal clauses and/or revisions.
- Contract Review: Reviews, negotiates, drafts, revises, and amends contracts to ensure compliance with University Rules.
- Contract Fulfillment: Participates in the development and fulfillment of contract requirements.
- Cost Estimation: Examines estimates of material, equipment, production costs, performance requirements, and delivery schedules.
- Contract Negotiation: Negotiates contracts and amendments with the customer or bidder.
- Information Reporting: Performs routine information gathering and reporting.
- Issue Resolution: Assists with investigating and resolving contract-related issues.
- Department Coordination: Coordinates the work of various departments and acts as liaison between the Institution and subcontractors to implement fulfillment of contracts.
- Document Management: Electronically maintains proper contracting files, records, and associated documentation.
- Contract Monitoring: Performs contract monitoring throughout the lifetime of the contract, including renewals, amendments, and terminations.
4. Contract Coordinator Roles
- Interview Coordination: Coordinate complex interview schedules and assist with candidate travel arrangements and reimbursements.
- Onsite Facilitation: Facilitate onsite interviews for candidates and interview panels, including greeting and checking in candidates, ordering lunches, and walking candidates out.
- Reference Checks: Conduct reference checks.
- Administrative Support: Handle administrative needs of the Talent Acquisition team, and TA event/meeting planning and coordination.
- Recruitment Support: Provide support with the department's recruiting and collecting candidate applications.
- Compliance Assurance: Ensure that all aspects of the recruiting process, policies, and procedures comply with employment regulations and laws at all levels to ensure compliance with the Company’s internal policies and procedures.
- ATS Maintenance: Assist with maintaining requisitions and recruiting information in the applicant tracking system.
- Audit Assistance: Assist with completing various Talent Acquisition internal audits (file retention policy).
- Talent Acquisition Growth: Evolve into other aspects of Talent Acquisition.
5. Bilingual Bid and Contract Coordinator Functions
- Bid Monitoring: Monitor bid sites for relevant opportunities related to Pacific Surgical products and services.
- GPO Interface: Interface with Group Purchasing Organization (GPO) and Shared Services Organizations to represent Pacific Surgical divisions.
- Tender Coordination: Act as a single point of contact for the sales team to submit qualified tenders, communicate timelines to relevant parties.
- Commercial Input Coordination: Coordinate all necessary commercial input required to respond to tenders (e.g., legal, controlling, logistics, quality, etc.).
- Tender Preparation: Use established templates and prepare a professional response to the tenders.
- Requirement Review: Ensure all specifications and requirements are reviewed and responded to in the required timeframe by the subject matter experts.
- Process Streamlining: Streamline the bid management process by developing and maintaining a central database/repository of commonly needed answers and documentation for quick turnaround on requests.
- Contract Management: Manage contract compliance, onboarding process, and documentation, including reporting/rebate requirements for contracts.
- Contract Renewal Support: Work with relevant sales personnel to renew, extend, or terminate contracts and price agreements.
- Task Execution: Complete various other tasks at the discretion of senior management.
- Ethical Representation: Represent Pacific Surgical and its divisions ethically at all times.
6. Senior Contract Coordinator Responsibilities
- Schedule Management: Planning, organising, scheduling, and booking their Gritting/Snow Clearance and Winter Maintenance Schedules, and supporting the Grounds Maintenance, Landscaping, and Invasive Species Teams.
- Team Issue Management: Proactively managing team issues related to jobs.
- Work Scheduling: Efficiently and accurately scheduling work onto several software scheduling systems.
- Stakeholder Communication: Daily interaction with customers, suppliers, internal teams, operational teams, and subcontractors to update on the progress of projects, answer queries, take requests for quotations, and resolve any issues.
- Call Handling: Handling incoming and outgoing calls, dealing with requests effectively and efficiently, taking accurate and detailed messages, and ensuring they are passed on to the relevant team member or department for resolution.
- Operations Coordination: Ensuring the operational, internal teams, and subcontractors are organised to deliver any works scheduled.
- Supplier Liaison: Liaising with suppliers to place orders and organise deliveries to ensure jobs are delivered on time.
- Record Maintenance: Maintaining accurate records across all systems in line with company processes and procedures.
- Supplier Administration: Administering the approved supplier and subcontractor spreadsheet.
- Subcontractor Setup: Sourcing and setting up new subcontractors, ensuring information is collated along with insurance documentation and draft contracts.
- Departmental Support: Supporting other departments to meet the operational needs of the business, especially during peak season.
7. Contract Engineer Accountabilities
- Methodology Review: Review and approval of detailed construction methodologies produced by the project teams, e.g., WPP/TBS/RA’s.
- ITP Approval: Approve the inspection and test plans produced by the project teams.
- Engineering Support: Assist team members, PM/SM/QS, with engineering input.
- Site Liaison: Liaise with Site Managers and Engineers.
- Client Liaison: Liaise with the client’s engineering representatives.
- Temporary Works Coordination: Act as the temporary works coordinator.
- Design Brief Production: Produce design briefs for temporary works and maintain the temporary works registers.
- Supervisor Appointment: Review and appoint Temporary Works Supervisors.
- Engineering Process Control: Ensure a robust process is in place for checking engineering activities.
- Handover Data Management: Collate information and data for handover.
- Design Review: Review the permanent works designs and manage design changes, technical queries, and requests for information.
- Material Compliance: Manage the approval and testing of the materials, product, plant, and systems such that they comply with the contract requirements.
8. Contract Management Specialist Duties
- Enquiry Response: Respond to all enquiries originating from both the MDT businesses and the purchasing body.
- Contract Processing: Process new contract awards and contract extensions.
- Price Management: Load new and revised customer prices onto the internal platform.
- Customer Communication: Communicate with customers around changes in price/contract/product offering, etc.
- Discrepancy Investigation: Investigate any discrepancies between the price quoted by a customer and that on the systems.
- Process Improvement: Proactively look for opportunities to continuously improve process efficiency and quality, raise the bar for contract management, and ensure customers’ orders can be processed seamlessly.
- Usage Reporting: Produce usage reports to confirm contracted volumes have been met before changing prices.
- Decision Support: Support commercial decision-making through analysis.
- Operational Partnership: Business partner with all operational teams within the organization.
- Issue Resolution: Proactively work with customers to resolve issues that are identified through daily work.
9. Contract Manager Job Summary
- Surveying and Quotation: Surveying works and production of quotations.
- Tender Pricing: Leading or assisting in the pricing and submission of tenders.
- PQQ and SQ Submission: Assisting and completing PQQ and SQ submissions.
- Health and Safety Documentation: Producing project Health and Safety information, including CPPs and RAMS, in liaison with the Health and Safety Management team.
- Programme Management: Producing and managing project programmes and timelines.
- Staff and Subcontractor Management: Managing directly employed staff and subcontractors.
- Site Health and Safety: Managing on-site Health and Safety, including the undertaking of site audits/inspections in line with company standard procedures.
- Meeting Participation: Attending project meetings and producing various reports and project documentation.
- Work Planning: Contributing to work planning and briefing project teams, contractors, and suppliers.
- Commercial Valuation: Managing and carrying out commercial valuations on projects and the agreement of project accounts.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Working closely with other internal departments (commercial, Health and Safety) and external (client, design team) to ensure the contracts are delivered on time and within financial budgets.
- Client and Site Visits: Making regular site and client visits (within a region, nationally or internationally, depending on the construction project).
10. Contract Manager Details and Accountabilities
- TSA Change Coordination: Coordinate the Change Requests for the Transitional Service Agreements (TSA) with the Service Owner on the Siemens Energy IT side.
- Status Overview Preparation: Prepare the required overview for the status of the Change Requests.
- Stakeholder Collaboration: Collaborate with Siemens AG to get the TSA Change Requests aligned and approved.
- Financial Reporting: Financial Reporting for the relevant Fiscal Years for the TSAs, including ramp down and ramp up.
- Process Improvement: Process improvements for the quarterly Change Cycles are under consideration by the different stakeholders.
- Database Communication: Communicate the concept for the updated Database with all information.
- Impact Analysis: Impact analysis for all TSA Services that are relevant for quantity and price changes (True-up process).
- Signature Organization: Organize all signatures from the CEO/CFO globally for the finalized Local Service Tickets, including tracking of status.
- Vendor Negotiation Support: Support the negotiations of frame contracts and individual contracts with vendors, including support of the IT RFx processes.
- Contract Review Contribution: Contribute to contract reviews by optimizing existing contracts and negotiating positions.
- Contract Compliance: Ensure the compliance of contract content.
- Contract Governance: Manage the contract governance and approval process, including updating the contract database.
- Dispute Management: Manage disputes and claim process, including reporting of vendor KPIs.
- Vendor Performance Management: Establish efficient vendor performance management.
- Vendor Recommendation: Support the demand management with recommendations of the best vendors.
- Vendor Relationship Management: Build and sustain relationships with strategic vendors.
11. Contract Specialist Essential Functions
- Contract Management: Accountable for contract formation, negotiation, and execution with strong knowledge of different types of contracts, including standalone agreements, IT agreements, and master service agreements.
- Legal Collaboration: Working collaboratively with the legal department to ensure proper review, negotiation, and execution of all Terms and Conditions for all contracts.
- Sourcing Document Preparation: Preparing sourcing (RFx) documents associated with the execution of operations agreements.
- Sourcing Process Management: Managing the sourcing process, including SSJ and proponent lists, contract strategies, correspondence with contractors, suppliers, and service providers, complete commercial evaluation including award recommendation, liaising with business units and legal.
- Contract Negotiation: Negotiating terms and conditions, working with business units, and the legal department to redline contract documents.
- Awarded Contract Management: Managing awarded contracts, including contract change orders, amendments, etc.
- SAP Management: Updating SAP to reflect standalone contracts, creating outline agreements in SAP to reflect executed master service agreements.
- Business Unit Liaison: Liaising with different business units regularly, providing reporting to the business units.
- Process Development: Building on existing processes and procedures, helping to create new processes and procedures (template creation, etc.).
- Personnel Mentoring: Providing guidance and mentoring personnel in the best practices of contract and procurement management.