Helping Consultants deliver a Gold standard in commercial assurance
The primary benefit for professional services organisations deploying Coria Digital Cost Assurance is a dramatic reduction in time and resources needed to deliver contracted outcomes. It also facilitates the ability to achieve a continuously improving competitive advantage, in a competitive skills market.
Rather than being limited by the capability, and availability of professionals to analyse and process information, Digital Cost Assurance hyper-automates the assessment of Defined Cost.
Critically, this does not replace people.
Rather it enhances the service capability and bandwidth of assurance teams and means professionals can add value by by effectively managing scope change and risks in a timely manner, allowing visibility of their impact to influence effective decision making.
What’s more, because the process for each client is simplified, teams can then manage multiple clients, projects, and problems more fully and effectively, increasing the ROI for each member of the team. People are an expensive resource: automating the complex and time-consuming data analysis activity in assessments of the Price of Work Done to Date allows you to add value; not focus skilled people’s time validating and managing data in legacy tools or spreadsheets.
Current methods of contracting Project Management and Cost Assurance professional services, by necessity, anticipate the need to sample audit cost data in each assessment.
Scopes target building up a full picture over time. Service provision under these conditions constantly runs the risk, compounded by fragmented and uncoordinated data, of being indefensible against claims of negligence when compared to a supplier’s quality management plan.
Digital Cost Assurance, undertaking provides the capacity to assess every line of cost data, every time an application is submitted, providing a complete evidence trail of assessment against all ECC4 commercial terms.
With this improved consistency and accuracy in service delivery, there is a significantly reduced risk of non-conformance to the suppliers quality management plan, and a solid defence against any claim relating to the service provision.
When engaged as a Project Manager, your role includes providing legally binding certification for payment; mistakes can be very serious and very expensive.
The Digital Cost Assurance tool and Coria’s service creates an auditable, transparent and standardised financial dataset for compliance, reducing any likelihood that a final audit would find consultants liable for over-certification.
Finally, a great advantage of Digital Cost Assurance, which applies to all users, is its impartiality and objectivity in assessing compliance in line with the contract.
It is designed to be applied to the project defined cost data and represents the intent of the contract where application of the contract is independent and impartial.
This is added protection to the Client under NEC ECC4 contracts where increasingly case law is showing that inadvertent partiality by a Project manager can undermine the Clients commercial position and expose it to extensive commercial risk.
It can be used with the entire NEC4 suite and adapted for use with any cost reimbursable form of contract in any market, globally. As a result, Digital Cost Assurance offers a gold standard of accuracy wherever it is applied.
