There are few areas in the contract manufacturing and packaging industry as sensitive as packaging contract management. And there are few areas where greater differences exist between customers in how they administer contracts. There are some customers who appear progressive in their interaction, and who have contracts exceeding 100 pages in length. Then there are other examples where barely more than a term sheet is in place…and sometimes not even that!
Here at the Foundation for Strategic Sourcing/F4SS, we analyzed current contracts among our members with an eye toward standardizing. We found that while there were a few outlier paragraphs, for the most part the sections and terms were comparable. As a result, we developed an industry-standard set of two-way contract terms based on the most-used paragraphs. We like to think this has contributed to industry harmonization.
