ABOUT – Contracktime

Forest CM, the company that develops the Contracktime® platform,was founded in 2012 by Mr. Nicolas Forest to meet an urgent need among stakeholders in industrial sector projects. For over 20 years, Nicolas Forest was a consultant specializing in contract and claims management across various industrial sectors and countries, both from the client and supplier perspectives.

EXPERTISES

CONTRACTS

Structuring engineering, procurement, and installation contracts

COMMISSIONING

Assisting in project commissioning, monitoring performance, and profitability

ANALYSIS

Supporting document and project data collection, fact reconstruction, and dispute analysis

SETTLEMENTS

Proposing and initiating project conflict resolutions

HOW CONTRACKTIME® WAS CREATED

PROBLEM STATEMENT

By definition, any information produced within a project framework has contractual value, whether generated by the project’s ‘productive’ team members or by a support function, all the way up to company management. This also extends to any information received from other project parties (client, subcontractor, supplier, partner, third party, etc.).

To identify all relevant data, every discipline/expertise involved in the project must be considered. This principle applies to any industry sector. For example, a typical industrial project sequence is:

Studies -> Procurement -> Manufacturing/Delivery -> Installation/Execution -> Testing -> Reception/Acceptance.

This means there are six ‘productive’ competencies, along with six essential ‘support’ functions: Quality Control, Health-Safety-Environment Control, Financial Accounting Control, Planning Control, Administrative Management, and Legal Department.

For each function, the questions to address are:

What information/data is produced?

Who produces it?

When is it produced?

Where is it stored, recorded, or archived?

A MASS OF WRITTEN INFORMATION TO PROCESS

What can a simple email reveal to identify and estimate the cost of an unforeseen project event?

Email date -> When did the issue arise?
Distribution list ->Who is involved (team, client, subcontractors, etc.)?
Subject & body text -> What is the issue?

With these answers (What, Who, When) the next steps are:

Linking this information to the schedule and/or a budget line to track project status daily.
Defining contractual responsibilities and estimating cost and time impacts.

By directly integrating received and sent emails, as well as meeting minutes into the contract schedule, we obtain an entirely factual project snapshot.

Example: I can already anticipate that I will be late on this task, which was planned to start in the short term, because today the parties are still discussing blocking points for the approval of the technical documents.

The vision is factual and indisputable because it is based on common data shared by the parties involved in the modification, the contractual change: we are both copied on the email, we are both participants in the meeting.

THE CAUSES OF DEVIATIONS | CHANGES | VARIATIONS

99% of deviations/changes occurring during a project stem from technical or special contract clauses (specifications, schedule, pricing). The administrative or general clauses are often adapted as a consequence of updates to technical clauses (e.g., a bank guarantee update following additional work or a deadline extension).

There are only two types of contractual deviations/changes:

– New tasks not originally planned in the contract

– Contracted tasks not completed within the planned deadlines and/or budget

CLIENT ISSUES

Ongoing or closing project/site << disputes and claims>> consume significant time and disrupt industrial project management on multiple levels:

Significant financial impacts : cost deviations, legal procedure fees, etc.
Delays.
Deterioration of relationships between parties.

These << disputes and claims>> usually arise from difficulties in managing and administrating the vast amounts of information produced in a project.

OPPORTUNITY

A bad news reported early is good information. The sooner a project manager analyzes an unforeseen contractual event, the sooner they can take the necessary operational decisions while managing schedule and budget variations.

Rigorous project tracking allows early identification of deviations, significantly reducing claims and disputes while optimizing compensations obtained (or reducing costs) on remaining/residual claims.

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