Services
Partnership Sessions
Building and sustaining tailored business relationships with key customers and suppliers can lead to a competitive advantage. However, partnerships are challenging to manage. Too often, managers enter into a relationship with another member of the supply chain without either side clearly identifying their expectations. This is the primary reason why these relationships fail to meet the goals of one or both sides. With this in mind, we have developed a model that can be used to identify the business reasons for building more closeness in a relationship (these are called 'drivers' of the partnership). In a day-and-a-half partnership session, a cross-functional management team from each company works separately with a facilitator to identify their firm's drivers of the partnership. After both sides have agreed on the drivers, the next step is to identify the appropriate type of partnership by considering the strength of the drivers and how the two organizations mesh. The output of the day-and-a-half session is a strategy and an action plan for managing the relationship and achieving each organization's drivers. We have conducted more than 80 partnership sessions with major corporations around the world. One example is the Wendy's and Tyson relationship, which was the basis for a 2004 article in Harvard Business Review. You can also read more detail on the partnership model in Chapter 14 of the book.
Cross-functional Assessments of Supply Chain Management Processes
We have developed assessment tools that can be used to benchmark an organization's practices with best practices and prioritize the identified improvement opportunities (see Chapter 10 and the Appendices). We offer two assessment services:
 |
a) Web-based Assessment: We provide access to our on-line assessment tool. You tell us which process you want to assess and provide us a list of the individuals who will be participating in the assessment. Then we set-up password protected access to the tool and e-mail directions to the participants. Once all the users have completed the assessment, we provide you with three reports:
Scores Report: For each item in the assessment, this report provides the average score, the range of scores, and a distribution of scores (in other words, how many people gave each score).
Justifications Report: For each item in the assessment, this report provides you with a list of all the comments that were made in the "Justification" field of the assessment. These comments are provided without names attached.
Individual Reports: These reports are given back to the individual participants. They provide a record of the scores and the justifications provided by each respondent.
These three reports are needed to facilitate the consensus building session where the participants review the scores and comments and determine the consensus score on each item.
b) Web-based Assessment Plus On-Site Facilitation: We take an active role in facilitating the assessment. In addition to the above, prior to using the assessment tool, we conduct a conference call with your team to familiarize them with the process being assessed and the assessment tool. Then, we attend and facilitate the consensus-building session. Based on the discussion of the consensus-building meeting, we help you develop a plan-for-action. The consensus-building meeting and the session for developing the action plan take a full day. Finally, we provide you with a summary report which incorporates our experience with other companies, identifies the biggest improvement opportunities, and offers guidance for implementation of these opportunities.
Process Implementation
We provide consulting services. We can tailor our involvement according to your needs. To discuss this further, contact us at info@scm-institute.org.
“With the integrated view of business described in this supply chain management framework, we found an excellent tool to map where we are and where we should be. We now have a comprehensive language that can be understood by everyone in the firm, as well as by key customers and suppliers. It has helped us shape the way our supply chain works in order to provide the best support for the business “
—Salvador Romo-Fragoso
Operations Director, Hewlett-Packard