Helpful tips to make your strategic supplier relationships work really well

Stakeholder and strategic service provider understanding can vary significantly when it comes to effective KPIs and their purpose is often misunderstood. Many strategic service contracts structured by client legal teams focus on KPIs being ‘transactional’.   In most strategic service delivery relationships…

The size, structure, skills and expertise of an Intelligent Client Function (ICF) team will depend upon the nature and scale of the supplier relationship, the business outcomes to be achieved and the criticality of the service being delivered. As services are added or removed to/from…

Optics are important in today’s commercial world – how you ‘look’ in the eyes of your consumer matters, more than ever before. Companies invest heavily in developing their audience’s perception of their brand – the ethics, morality and mission that…

Although we are no longer part of the EU, large parts of the EU Procurement Regulations still apply for UK public sector bodies. For above threshold procurements there are five main procurement routes you can take, these are: Open Procedure, Restricted Procedure, Competitive Procedure with Negotiation (CPN), Competitive Dialogue (CD) and Frameworks. There are hundreds of…

This article considers 4 options available to you to speed up the procurement process, including using the public sector procurement regulations to do so safely. Speed and safety tend to be considered as sitting at opposite ends of a scale. When a process is speeded up it will…

When the National Audit Office (NAO) conducted a departmental overview of the Home Office, issues were raised about the way it managed its £3 billion a year spend on goods and services. These issues were about how challenges on these…

You sometimes perceive that your strategic partner (supplier) is not listening to you. You feel they become defensive at everything you raise with them. You feel as though they are deliberately avoiding remediating the problem you perceive and despite you continually raising issues, you are failing to…

The cross-party public accounts committee (PAC) has reportedly ostracised senior government officials for holding back evidence – by as much as eight months – that Europe’s biggest infrastructure project, HS2, was in serious financial difficulty and they allegedly knew full…

What could have been hailed as a success story of a public sector project brought in on time, has sadly found its way into the media spotlight for costs that have shot well past budget expectations. The report also indicates…

High failure rates are common in most complex projects/service delivery relationships. Some research puts failure rates as high as 87% and as ‘low’ as 56%. With great spend, comes great responsibility. With so many interconnected activities to monitor and support,…

It was only last month that we were highlighting reports of the multibillion-pound deal that was to see US security company Allied Universal win out over rival GardaWorld to gain the G4S board’s approval to buy the company. With £3.8bn…

When the Grenfell Tower Inquiry resumed last year, four shocking key facts were revealed about the blaze that still reverberate in most Londoner’s memories. We outline the revelations highlighted in a recent Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply (CIPS) article…

There are many reasons why you might consider Insourcing services or a function that has previously been delivered by an external third-party provider. We look at the typical challenges organisations face when undertaking the decision to insource and the foundations…

One of the key factors in creating a successful supplier relationship is to understand that the written contract terms with your supplier do not represent the final word on how your partnership should be maintained. If your supplier represents itself…

In this final article on the recent National Audit Office (NAO) report surveying the public sector’s readiness for responsibility over hundreds of PFI contracts as they come to an end, we look at the recommendations that were put forward to…

A Private Finance Initiative (PFI) is a public private partnership, used to finance the creation and maintenance of major public sector projects in the UK since the 1990s. In 2018, the government announced that it would no longer be using…

“After lengthy, fully contested proceedings, the Tribunal concluded that the audit work fell significantly short of the standards expected of an audit firm and its partners.” These are reportedly the words of the Financial Reporting Council’s Executive Counsel Elizabeth Barrett…

Best Practice Group’s OPTIMISE methodology for how to effectively manage strategic supplier relationships simplifies the management of highly complex contracts, relationships and detailed technical services delivery, accelerating collaborative innovation and reducing on-going BAU costs.  How you will manage your strategic supplier relationship should be established before…

Holiday travel is one thing there’s not much of right now. The pandemic has not only put paid to most people’s dreams of relaxing on a golden beach this year, but it has put many in the travel sector in…

High failure rates are common in most complex service delivery relationships. Some research puts failure rates as high as 87% and as ‘low’ as 56%. Either way, based on these statistics, the client’s chances of driving maximum value in its supplier…

When we are asked to realign a complex service delivery relationship, we often find that each stakeholder has a slightly different definition of what a ‘strategy’ should look like. The most effective way to think of a strategy is as…

A well-articulated business vision means having documented clarity of your required business outcomes, what your organisation or department is aiming to achieve over the short, medium and longer term. It has two primary aims:  To ensure your internal team understand…

It is easy to say that SMART KPIs must clearly align to business objectives and to state that your business vision and your business objectives must be clearly articulated, however, the process needs focus and collaborative input and agreement from…

Disputes can often be regarded as the roadblock that prevents strategic supplier relationships from living up to their potential. They are the result of a collapse of commercial trust, poor communication and misaligned service delivery that signifies the breakdown of…

Last month we wrote about G4S’s resistance to GardaWorld’s £3bn hostile takeover bid, saying that the board had “… unanimously rejected this offer as it continues to significantly undervalue the company”. However, The Times now informs us that rival US…

An Ofcom investigation, which has been going on since June, has concluded that in their provisional view, Motorola Solutions UK and Sepura have broken UK and EU competition law during what should have been a competitive procurement process by UK…

Despite the protestations of G4S in public, the organisation’s actions suggest the possibility of a warmer reception behind the scenes to Allied Universal’s approaches, according to reports in The Times last month. The appointment of an independent consultant as a…

Earlier this year, the National Audit Office (NAO) and the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) produced critical reports on the state of the UK’s nuclear deterrent programme. A £1.35bn increase in costs over three projects was put down to a number…

This month the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) released a critical report on two decades of NHS failure to get its IT projects right. This is summed up at the opener of the report “The Department [Department of Health and Social…

When Strategic Suppliers represent themselves as a specialist in the services you would like them to manage, the law implies certain obligations and responsibilities upon those suppliers, (their Expert Responsibilities) even if those responsibilities aren’t documented in any written contract terms or schedules…

In the pursuit of successful strategic supplier relationships, the old adage ‘prevention is the best cure’ comes to mind frequently, so the question of how to minimise and mitigate procurement risk is a common one. The fact is that most…

The most successful service delivery relationships have business case development at their core, ensuring that they clearly articulate the specifics of what will change in the organisation once the business objectives or outcomes have been achieved. A sound business case will identify what operational, financial…

Ambiguity in service/solution requirements specification is the single biggest cause of disputes in complex strategic supplier relationships. Our ‘Optimise’ service/solution requirements process assures clarity in aligning your specific requirements to your business outcomes. They will be free of ambiguity and can be contractually…

Behaviours that build commercial trust aren’t complicated, but they are challenging to implement consistently, every day. This is because a whole host of interruptions and competing priorities encroach on your time. Working with your Strategic Supplier to prioritise your business outcomes is an important first…

Commercial trust in strategic supplier relationships concerns the ‘on-the-ground’ behaviours of both parties. It exists when someone does what they say they are going to do when they say they are going to do it.  Commercial trust is mainly about the individuals in…

Is there an inherent potential for a conflict of interest when the same firm of accountants that audits a company’s accounts also does a considerable amount of consultancy work for them? Their professional standards body states these organisations have a…

Suppliers come in all stripes. Some operate as genuine partners – identifying ever-more effective operating practices often, without being asked. In these types of strategic relationships, everyone wins: the clients/service users win because they benefit from ongoing reductions in business-as-usual…

The urge to exit a failed strategic supplier or outsourcing relationship can be so strong that clients leap to instruct their lawyers before they have fully assessed the operational (as opposed to contractual) risks of getting out of a failed contract, early. In short, they do not…

As strategic and trusted supplier partners, the ‘big four’ – PwC, Deloitte, KPMG and EY – take on a significant percentage of the audit work the market has to offer. Reportedly around 97% of all FTSE 350 companies have audit…

Strategic partnership relationships are inherently complex entities. At their outset, you will inevitably know less about one another than six to twelve months later. However, at the outset you are expected to develop a roadmap in the form of a…