Our company operates throughout Europe in the renewable energy sector. In order to provide our customers with optimal support and minimize risks in the future, we are looking for a contract manager to manage our contracts. We are a project developer and plant operator and work from the planning and construction stages through to the operational life of the plants with a large number of different contracts and within the legal requirements of the EEG and other official requirements (such as the requirements of the Federal Network Agency).
The future contract management software should fulfill the following requirements:
- The software must be able to map comprehensive “task management” (dates, deadlines, current and future tasks, current status of the contract, etc.).
- Evaluations and reporting should not only be possible on a project-specific basis, but also across projects (dates, contractual partners, timeline, in Excel, in Word, etc.).
- PDFs should be stored in a readable format (or be accessible via the corresponding resource in the DMS).
- Simple search, keyword and full-text search should be possible.
- Drag-and-drop filing should be possible.
- Workflows should be storable (escalation levels, substitution rules, easy changeability in the event of a change of supervisor, etc.).
- Clear and simple linking of original contracts with changes and addenda
- Automatic generation of correspondence with simultaneous storage in the DMS should be possible
- Automatic transfer (“automatic reading”) of data, etc. from scanned PDFs should be possible
- Training of key users + user manual + test phase
- Training of employees
- Interfaces to existing solutions must be available:
- DMS (document management)
- Technical operations management software
- MS Navision, MS Outlook
- Venga! from KBS, if applicable
- The software must be leaseable
- Assignment of rights (read only, read and write)
“Nice to have” requirements:
- Store important data (from contracts and legal requirements)
- Federal Immission Control Act, Renewable Energy Sources Act, Portugal, UK
- “Contracts”: also unit certificate, plant certificate, type testing, etc.
- Dates
- Also dates such as shareholders' meetings, customs, etc.
- Store (internal) processes for important dates (process cards)
- Store DMS link to the document (e.g., liquidity plan)
- Resubmission option with individual process steps
- Notice periods
- Terms
- Extension must be able to be stored
- Termination must be able to be stored
- New contract/amendment must be able to be stored
- Payment dates
- Amount of payment (debit/credit comparison incl. warning function)
- Send reminders to park managers or representatives
- It must be easy to make changes to the stored park managers
- Changes to the stored contract data may only be made by the park manager alone (otherwise, dual control principle for changes made by third parties)
- Store dates/resubmissions according to customer requirements (individual agreements with investors)
- Connection to DMS (when validating invoices and calling up contracts)
- Reconciliation of data with BELQ (Navision)
- Evaluations for all customers
- Store contact, payment, and xx data for all contracts
- Connection to Replant
- Overview evaluations for each wind farm, including master data from RePlant (IBN, date, wind turbine, type, etc.)
- Word connection with automated text templates, e.g., termination letters, invoices, or reminders
- Escalation levels to team leaders in case of delay (possibly traffic light system)
- Completeness check (certain contract types must be valid) with information to team leaders and mandatory comments in case of justified deviations.
- Data security
- Audit compliance
- CV file
- Options for storing notes on contracts, customers, or contact persons.
- Contract creation of certain contracts (operating management contracts)
- Enter and assign certain contracts once
- Automated invoicing for certain contracts (partial invoice + final invoice) if necessary
Approximately 35 software workstations or users are planned for the time being. More are to be added later.