Helpful tips to make your strategic supplier relationships work really well

You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been, as they say. So, by taking a look back at the origins of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and how the outsourcing market has evolved and…

Outsourced relationships can often be punctuated with opportunities for controversy. Having dealt with improving the performance of over 500 outsourcing relationships after the event of them already having been contracted, evidence continues to teach us that more than 50% of…

One of the most common mistakes organisations make is not planning their vendor termination strategy as carefully as they planned choosing their strategic vendor in the first place. Getting out of the agreement (safely and quickly) often takes more work…

Many of our blogs refer to the importance of not only entering larger contracts in the right way but also the equal, if not greater, importance of managing these contracts and the providers they are with, once they are in…

In July the NAO published a cross-governmental lessons-learned report dedicated to the question of how to ensure that when implementing digital change, major projects have a greater opportunity to achieve a positive outcome. It’s a vital document, seeing as the…

As you’ll no doubt have experienced for yourself, the success of a strategic supplier relationship starts with a strong foundation of good collaboration which, in turn, is driven by solid commercial trust. The key is making strategic contracts fit for…

Effective contract and supplier management involves a number of facets. At its core, though, are two fundamental points: Define and maintain a clear purpose with your strategic contractor/supplier, so that roles and responsibilities between you remain aligned to the business…

The complexities of client/supplier relationships – between signing the contract and commencement of the implementation – can, in many cases, be distilled down to a key set of principles and ‘checklist’ of actions… these leads many to ask, “what is…

Your Challenge – You are overseeing a major project that involves a significant service delivery transformation or the procurement of a complex IT solution. You may be engaging in a new strategic supplier relationship or need to improve one that is…

Articles on the subject of a successful outsourcing partnership tend to deal with the timeline in segments – some will talk about essentials at the inception stage, while others will wax lyrical about ways to keep your supplier on your…

Less than half of all strategic supplier relationships achieve the business outcomes the client expects. Just let that sink in for a moment. This means that over fifty per cent of clients are wondering where it all went wrong. This…

While some people revel in breaking through established boundaries, the vast majority would prefer the stability and relative comfort of the status quo. Change may befall an organisation in a myriad of ways, but all are likely to bring with…

You may have heard the statistic that 70% of complex, large-scale digital transformation projects fail. This was presented in an article by strategic consultants McKinsey a few years ago and has been referenced many times since. However, it seems that…

They say that in a crisis you find out who you really are. In fact, US founding father, Thomas Paine said it far more eloquently than that in 1776 when he wrote: “These are the times that try men’s souls.…

A research report on ‘The value of supplier codes of conduct: supporting transparency and improving performance’, co-authored by sustainability, business and human rights consultancy Ardea International and the University of Westminster Business School, has presented some interesting analysis. It includes…

In the public sector, procurement should have, at its foundation, strictly process-orientated procedures, with clear supplemental processes to make sure that solutions and services purchased are fit for purpose, not just that they follow legal procurement compliance. However, if those…

It was reported that EY has been the focus of a request by the charity, ‘Spotlight on Corruption’ (SoC), to the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) – the government’s procurement body – for EY to be banned from bidding on any…

Once you have formally terminated the relationship, you need to treat the exit process as a key project in its own right. You will have developed a Business Case for the early contract termination and a well-considered exit plan. As with any project, the exit must have…

The Client-Side PFI Manager is the person in the client organisation with direct responsibility for managing the operational PFI contract. The management of operational PFI contracts consists of frequent, ad hoc and periodic activities. Frequent activities are those that need…

In March The Times reported that outsourcing giant Capita was continuing to go through a troubling period, with significant falls in revenues and headline profits necessitating further internal organisational changes. This may not be either surprising or hugely troubling for…

Prior to Covid taking hold, the retrospective view on over 11 years of public sector austerity looked bleak as a result of some of our friends in the banking sector taking major financial risks resulting in what was then an…

When times are tough, as they certainly have been over the last year, people tend towards one of two camps – those who are predominantly inward-looking, protecting what’s theirs (their home, their family, their friends), and those who are predominantly…

Your failing strategic supplier relationship is beyond repair and you have reached the point of terminating the contract. You want to make sure the exit goes as smoothly as possible in what might be a very challenging situation where emotions…

When public sector procurement is mentioned, it is often to discuss the complexities of compliance with strict processes and procedures and the challenges which may arise holistically when these are not followed as fastidiously as they might have been. Thoughts…

Client-supplier relationships come in many forms; however, it’s all too easy for them to end up being treated as merely ‘transactional’, where the client puts pressure on the supplier to achieve the lowest price and the supplier delivers the lowest…

Operational governance is the management framework within which decisions over assuring service delivery performance are made. It is one of the critical elements of any strategic supplier relationship where complex service provision is involved. Accountabilities and responsibilities associated with an organisation’s ‘business as usual’ (BAU) activities should…

You may be familiar with the concept of the Intelligent Client and the Intelligent Client Function (ICF), but what about the ‘Intelligent Supplier’ – would you know what to look for to determine if your strategic provider is operating as an Intelligent Supplier? Would you…

When we focus too much on the cost of a project and not enough on the value it produces, we ignore a whole host of less visible opportunities and risks, any one of which could spin a strategic relationship off…

New York-based turnaround management specialists, Alvarez & Marsal, were appointed as administrators of NMC Health after irregularities were discovered in the company’s accounts. By the end of 2020, it was reported they had issued a ‘preliminary notice’ of a potential…

In this article we explain the why, what and how of the PFI Operations Manual – the cornerstone of effective and consistent day to day contract management. The typical length of a PFI contract (20-30 years), makes it extremely unlikely…

Negotiating early contract termination and exit is challenging and emotions often run high. If you have concerns about how to negotiate early contract termination, there are steps you can take that will smooth the process and increase your chances of a successful outcome. If…

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…