For eight years I negotiate IT contracts as supplier and customer, the past three years at Mercedes-Benz Schweiz. My team and I have improved service quality and achieved savings of up to 38% with support of my supervisor and I'll tell you how we did it. 

 

An essential element for a good contract is to understand the structure of the services offered and the costs in order to compare them with our own calculations and other supplier offers. But sometimes suppliers try to hide too high margins in non-transparent cost calculations, especially maintenance contracts. Therefore, it is important to negotiate with different suppliers to get a good contract. 

 

The first draft contract is only the starting point for negotiating a better one. Sometimes we went too far and pushed too much out of our suppliers, which affected their quality or performance. In such a case we knew we had reached the bottom and rowed back a bit until we found a good balance between price and performance.