Contract Reviews: A Better Start for Manufacturing Orders

Who this article is for: Production managers, operations managers and senior business leaders who want to improve on-time delivery and customer satisfaction, or who are considering a new ERP system. It is especially relevant if you are reviewing what happens between receiving a customer purchase order and acknowledging it.

What is a contract review?

A contract review is a series of checks your team completes before accepting a customer purchase order into the business. It is usually part of sales order processing.

The aim is to make sure the team has considered what it will take to fulfil the order. Depending on your business, that might mean reviewing quality requirements, capacity, scheduling, engineering or tooling. The questions should reflect the checks your business needs to make—not simply form a generic checklist.

Why does it matter for delivery?

It can be tempting to acknowledge an order as quickly as possible and deal with questions later. The difficulty is that an overlooked requirement may not become obvious until the job is approaching delivery. At that point, the team has less room to respond and may have to scramble to get the order out of the door.

A contract review creates a deliberate pause at the start of the process. That pause gives the team an opportunity to identify what needs attention before the order progresses. While it can look like an additional step, the intention is to save time downstream by addressing potential problems earlier.

This is why a contract review matters to more than order administration. A smoother route from purchase order to delivery supports on-time delivery and customer satisfaction—both of which matter when you want customers to stay and grow with your business.

Setting up contract reviews in Fraction ERP

Fraction ERP includes a configurable contract review process. You can switch it on in the settings menu, then tailor it to the needs of your business.

If you want a starting point, you can add the standard set of questions and edit or build on them. Alternatively, you can create your own sections and questions from scratch. For example, you might organise the review around:

• Quality: What needs to be checked before the order is despatched?
• Capacity: Has the team considered its ability to take on the work?
• Scheduling: What needs to be understood about the delivery timetable?
• Engineering and tooling: Are there requirements the team needs to review before proceeding?

These are examples, not a proposed structure. The value our system offers comes from configuring the review around the decisions your team needs to make when an order arrives.

Making the review part of the workflow

A checklist is less useful if it can be bypassed in the rush to acknowledge an order. In Fraction ERP, enabling contract reviews disables the order acknowledgement buttons on the contract page until the review is complete. Once the review has been completed, the buttons become available again and the team can finish the acknowledgement process.

The main contract status page also displays contract review statuses at a glance. That makes it easier to see which reviews still need attention, particularly if you work to a strict timeline after receiving a customer purchase order.

Start with the process, not the software

Whether or not you use Fraction ERP, the question is the same: what does your team need to check before it accepts and acknowledges an order?

If you do not already have a contract review process, start by identifying the questions that repeatedly cause problems when they are answered too late. Build those checks into order intake so the team can address them earlier.

If you would like to see how that process can work in Fraction ERP, get in touch.