What we solve ·Should I approve what is on my desk?
Vanguard · Guide
Are they delivering what they promised you in the contract?
The vendor's dashboard shows green and the operation keeps going down.
What they promised you, what they delivered, which clauses you can actually enforce and what you have to renegotiate with.
Vendor contract and performance auditSend this page to whoever decides
This sounds like you if
- You have a large renewal in the next six months.
- There was an incident the vendor did not acknowledge as a breach.
- The contract sets out penalties that have never been claimed.
Use this today, without hiring anyone
Five common clauses whose drafting leaves the obligation with no practical way to enforce it. They are in most contracts and they can be spotted in an afternoon of reading, with nobody's help.
- Component availability, not service availability. The vendor measures their servers. You live on your people being able to work. The two numbers can differ by an order of magnitude and both be true.
- Averages instead of percentiles. A monthly average hides eight bad hours on the worst day of the close. Demand the 95th percentile and the conversation changes on its own.
- The clock starts when they accept the ticket. Not when you open it. Nobody measures that interval and it is usually the longest.
- Exclusions for maintenance and third-party cause. Well drafted, they cover almost any outage. Count how many hours of the month are actually being measured.
- Credits that expire and have to be claimed in writing. If nobody claims, the vendor owes nothing. It is the most common clause and the one that leaves the most money uncollected.
How we solve it
The method, not the promise.
- The contract gets read separating what is enforceable from what, given its drafting, is unlikely to be.
- Real performance gets reconstructed from your incident records, not from the vendor's report.
- The two get cross checked: what was promised against what was delivered, month by month.
- What was never claimed and what was paid for and never consumed get quantified, with a figure that can be defended at the table.
- The leverage points get ordered by what the vendor concedes first, which is rarely price.
What you receive
- The matrix of enforceable and unenforceable clauses, with the reason for each.
- The month by month comparison between what was reported and what happened, supported by your own records.
- The figure for unclaimed penalties and for services paid for and not consumed.
- A renegotiation script with the order in which to ask.
The proof that applies here
- 19 years in both chairs: service agreements sold from HPE and IBM and bought, measured and enforced from Citi.
- Operations leadership over 60,000 servers with global vendors.
- License elimination program worth more than 100 million dollars a year in a global financial institution.
Before you hire
Which clause is not enforceable and why gets pointed out; the legal opinion on its enforceability is signed by your lawyer.
A firm that earns a commission from the vendor you want audited has a conflict that more reviewers do not resolve. Here the agreements get read by someone who spent 19 years in both chairs: selling them from HPE and IBM and enforcing them from Citi.
When was the last time you claimed a penalty, and what happened?