Which contracts should we review?
The business question Which contracts should we review? shows the period of validity of the contracts and the lifecycles of the applications and components that are specified as the contract deliverables.
Review contracts with impending end dates in order to make informed decisions about architectural changes based on your contracts with IT suppliers or service providers. Understand which contracts are associated with a particular vendor and ensure that license usage is in line with the contact deliverables. This business question helps you to manage and align your contract library, minimize planning risk, and avoid unnecessary costs.
The license package Contract Management is required to work with this business question. The use case Contract Alignment must be activated.
A Gantt chart shows the lifecycles of applications and components and their associated contracts. You can expand and collapse the rows in the first column.
- The first level shows either
applications or 
components, their object state, and highlights conflicts due to the impending end of a contract's period of validity. The timeline shows a colored bar with lifecycle statuses and a red bar visualizes the active period (start date - end date) of the application or component. - The second level shows the
contract. The colored bar shows the period of validity (start date - end date) of the contract. A light blue rectangle on the timeline highlights the contract's review date. - The third level shows the
contract deliverable with the number of used or planned licenses for the application or component. The colored bar shows the time period that the licenses are valid. A red rectangle on the bar will highlight an overuse if more licenses are allocated for the contract deliverable than are permissible. - The blue vertical line indicates the current date.
- Relationships between predecessor and successor applications as well as predecessor and successor contracts are displayed as vertical lines:
- A black vertical line begins at the end of the predecessor application's lifecycle and points to the start of the successor application lifecycle. Point to the black line to view a tooltip showing the predecessor application, successor application, and end date of the predecessor application.
- A blue vertical line begins at the end of the predecessor contract and points to the start of the successor contract. Point to the blue line to view a tooltip showing the predecessor contract, successor contract, and end date of the predecessor contract.
Contracts must be in the repository and well-documented. The following data is required about in order to have meaningful results for the business question Which contracts should we review?
- Contract > Start Date and End Date: Specify to understand the validity period of a contract.
- Contract > Review Date attribute: Specify to manage the contract and ensure that successor contracts are available.
- Contract > Affected applications and components: Specify the IT architecture that is bought in the context of the contract in order to understand the roadmap of the IT architecture.
Go to the Data Quality page and resolve the issues to ensure that the data is complete.
Go to the Data Source page to review the vendors, contracts, applications, and components that are used to answer the business question. The data source is a list report and cannot be edited.