Legal
you can take action quickly and effectively if payment is withheld. So, for example, does the contract allow for payment within a reasonable time period, say 14 or 28 days? And how soon after that can you take action? Can you claim interest on late payments or do you have to rely on the statutory provisions relating to interest? Equally important, from your
viewpoint, are service levels and the circumstances when the contract can be terminated for non-performance. Are you given the opportunity to remedy a breach or is termination automatic? Can the client demand termination of one or more elements or does a breach mean the entire agreement will terminate? Of course, commercially, the longer the notice period, the better for a contractor, so this should be checked from the outset.
Clients and suppliers will often have their own terms and conditions and it may be difficult to negotiate more favourable terms. It is preferable to use your own standard terms of trading wherever possible, so you can negotiate from a
position of strength. But many organisations choose not to, believing that the client will always insist on using their own contracts. However, regardless of who has prepared the contract, it is important to know where the possible risks lie, since any contract should minimise the risks that you face. Standard contracts from clients and suppliers will probably contain service
levels and detailed warranties and penalties for non-performance. These could have an impact on you financially and might even affect your decision when tendering or pricing up the job. The importance of a good contract
usually only becomes evident when something has gone wrong or when the contract is being terminated. If you have
agreed to onerous terms and conditions, a client or supplier might hold you to those terms once the relationship has soured. At that point though, it’s usually far too late to negotiate new terms and far too late to protect yourself contractually. Claudia Gerrard is a legal consultant at Excello Law. You can call her on: 07447 985647 or email her at:
cgerrard@excellolaw.co.uk
Flexible rail ticketing system is up in the cloud
T
he Live Sales Management system will provide the UK rail industry with a flexible, highly available cloud- based solution to support ‘ticket- on-departure’ - the collection of
rail tickets from self-service ticket machines after buying them earlier on the web. The company estimates that utilising
cloud services will allow the system to scale to a billion tickets per annum by 2018 without the need for additional computer hardware. Currently the ticket-on-departure service handles ticket sales totalling £1.8 billion per annum. As well as providing a foundation for
other delivery channels such as mobile and smartcards, the new system will support the next generation of ticket issuing systems and enable cost reductions and better productivity for all franchises when issuing passenger rail tickets. UK IT consultancy firm, Smart421, has commenced the development phase of a multi-year contract to design, build and manage the new system, which also provides a foundation for other delivery channels
Ticketing
Rail Settlement Plan, the ticketing consortium of train operating companies in the UK, is moving its UK-wide ticketing system to the cloud with Amazon Web Services (AWS)
such as mobiles and smartcards. Steve Howes, managing director at RSP, said: ‘This Live Sales Management project will deliver high quality service at reasonable cost which is good news for all industry stakeholders. We realise that this project will be watched very carefully because of its importance to RSP and the train operating companies we serve.’ Neil Miles, managing director at
Smart421, said: ‘Rail ticketing demand goes through seasonal and daily peaks and troughs, which makes it a great use case for cloud computing. By choosing AWS technologies, Smart421 is giving RSP the ability to scale up their infrastructure during peak seasons and scale back during the off-peak times. ‘This means that RSP can save money
and time on managing technology infrastructure and can better serve the rail customers of the UK.’
Neil Miles, MD - Smart421
To learn more about Rail Settlement Plan go to
www.atoc.org/about-atoc/rail-settlement-plan
FEBRUARY 2013 PAGE 31
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