Samenvatting

Medisol has transformed itself from a small start up to becoming a medium sized company since its establishment in 2001. Due to this continuous exponential growth and expansion, the management has among its goals for the year 2020 to work on the process of scaling up its operations so that its activities become more professionalised.
Medisol wants to start working with dealer contracts with effect from 2020 when dealing with re-sellers for its products. This is aimed at not only making the relationship with its customers official and formal but also aiding its process of acquiring certificates such as the ISO and MDR1 which certificates are crucial in further enhancing credibility with its customers.
However much the company wants to introduce contractual relationships, it would as well not like its new system to compromise the already existing relationship it has with its dealers and certainly also not with its prospective dealers. Just like Fites (1996) in his article ‘Make Your Dealers Your Partners’ posted in Harvard Business review wrote; “The quality of the relationship between a company and its dealers is much more important than the contractual agreements or the techniques and tactics that make the relationship work on the surface (…) For a company that relies on independent dealers to present one face to its customers around the world, it must have uniform practices and performance standards for dealers and treat them all with equal consideration while recognizing that they are independent and unique in many ways”.
Therefore, the management is wondering the appropriate elements to include in such a contractual arrangement which will define the responsibilities and rewards for performing activities (contractual control) as well as elaborate on the shared set of implicit principles or norms that coordinate the activities performed by Medisol and its dealers and govern the relationship (Normative control). In addition, it is not clear to the management whether to work with a single contract or have customised contracts since its operations are in various countries. This contract should contribute further towards achieving one of the themes at the company for the year 2020, that is to say; “Keep Your customer”.

The project aim of this research is to show Medisol the importance of having certain elements in its contractual relationship arrangement with its dealers aimed at not only making the cooperation official and professional but also preserving a good working relationship with them as a measure of keeping them as its customers for a long time.

To achieve this, research will be carried out to fill the information gaps. First of all, information will be searched with regard to: The expectations of the contracting parties with regard to Information exchange, Operational linkages, Adaptations, Legal bonds and cooperative Norms.

As a result of the literature and field researches, gaps will be identified between the needs for Medisol and those for its dealers basing on the elements identified during Literature research. Finally, when this has been done, the knowledge and information gathered will be used to draw conclusions and put forward recommendations to Medisol thereby increasing the likelihood of using this contract arrangement to keep Medisol customer. This solution will eventually lead to the creation of a professional product.