Prospective Partner Profile -

Alliances-Outsourcing-Supply Chain

We anticipate that this service will appeal to organisations or service providers who are either involved in, or facilitate Business-to-Business partnerships, either as a formal alliance, an outsourcing arrangement or a supply chain partnership. You will be well established in your field of specialty in this environment, but you are looking for new tools and methods that address the increasing complexity of stakeholders that have to be managed and/or facilitated.

This service is a combination of the Stakeholder Engagement and Organisational Improvement packs. While Alliances, Outsourcing and Supply Chain applications look like a single business to business relationship, one we look ‘under the covers’ their will be a complex web of organisational roles on both sides that need to be managed to achieve a successful outcome.

Our ONA platform is able to deal with this complexity by firstly visualising the stakeholder network at the individual role or even person level; identifying the key risk points and then providing tools for helping to negotiate a better collaborative outcome.

Case Study - Global Natural Resources Company

Context
Major global natural resources company and its IT outsourcing partnership

The Problem
The organisation had a mature IT outsourcing arrangement where the client supplier relationship remained tense despite good SLA performance by the supplier. Both parties were looking for a way to improve the relationship.

Solution
A two day workshop was run where Optimice provided its value network analysis and Partnership Scorecard techniques to examine the tangible and intangible value exchanges expected by the respective parties down to the role level. The process was able to surface many of the intangible value flows that are not articulated in the outsourcing contract but are very much a part of the relationship expectations.

Benefits
By surfacing the intangible expectations of each party, the areas of 'disconnect' became clear and therefore could be explicitly addressed. Even with mature partnerships there can exist many disconnects around the unwritten expectations that need to be surfaced to be effectively addressed.

Case Study - World-wide Charity Organisation

Context
World-wide Charity Organisation

The Problem
Located across many countries this organisation operates a complex supply chain across the myriad of funding sources advisors, mentors and approvers. Managing this complex supply network presents a significant challenge.

Solution
An organisational network analysis survey was conducted across two of the countries to start to visualise what the supply network really looked like. The analysis was able to identify some key mentoring and advisor roles across both countries and to also identify the lack of global integration of connections between the countries.

Benefits
For many organisations their stated supply chain is often a simplification of a much more complex web of interactions. By using the network visualisation techniques, the organisation was able to identify supply network gaps and focus more precisely their improvement interventions.

Deliverables

Some example tools and outputs are shown here:

The above network map shows the detail of dependencies in an outsourcing relationships. The colours denote the different service units. One service unit in this case appears to be not totally engaged in the partnership.

Participants in the network are mapped onto a dependency grid. This grid can be used to assess risks and opportunities for building better business-to-business alliances.

The above table is a typical output from a Partnership Scorecard activity. Specific value exchanges have been articulated and negotiated between roles and a value rating assigned by the receiving role. Relative costs can also be allocated by the provider.

Using the Partnership Scorecard data it is possible to identify where the highest value interventions can be targeted. This is where there is an assessed Performance gap between what is desired and what is currently being delivered along with the relative value and cost assessments.