Summer 2020 MBA Intern - Contracting

The Center for Contract Management (CCM) team has processed over 1,000 contracts in 2019, at an average turnover time of 15 days, which is 25% less than 2018. Year on year the team has delivered faster support to the Commercial Organization and we intend to still improve the process. While the process is fully streamlined once the requests go into our contract management system, there are opportunities to streamline the communication between the contract Business Owner and Contract Manager (CM) when a request is initially sent to a CM. Across Vertex, Contract Managers have different approaches to getting the information they need to initiate a contract – email requests, checklists, VCT entries and none of them is optimal.

The CCM intern will develop an optimized solution for initial contract information intake that can be implemented by CMs across Vertex to simplify and streamline the initial step in the contracting process. The student will partner with contract managers, leaders and stakeholders in the contracting groups across Vertex to understand current state of the process. The student will research potential solutions to streamline the information intake and make a recommendation on the most effective and efficient way to initiate contract requests.

Key Responsibilities:

1. Conduct current state of process assessment across Commercial and G&A contracting groups to understand gaps. Assessment should be done via interviews with contracting stakeholders, email monitoring, system scoping.

2. Identify a couple of solutions to simplify the first step in the contracting process with pros and cons and make a recommendation on what should be implemented.

3. Design a plan to implement the solution – timeline, actions, resources.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Must be independently motivated and a strong team player

• Excellent verbal and written communications skills, demonstrated analytical and research abilities

• Experience in business operations and process improvement.

• Previous contract negotiation/management exposure