What would happen if you starting thinking of your vendors, your suppliers, your service providers, your investors and even your government entities/agencies as important contributors to your organization's unique competitive advantage? Rather than confronting them periodically and bullying or cajoling them to take less of your money, you'd ask them all to help you not merely reduce your average total costs but to measurably increase both your top-line and bottom-line results. In return, you'd also help them to reduce their average total costs and to measurably increase both their top-line and bottom-line results.
Expand this performance-based "extended enterprise" perspective to include anyone who receives money, products, services or other valuable consideration from your organization (especially your supply chain value drivers, your channel partners, your independent contractors, your clients and your customers) -- and imagine the dramatic potential impact on your go-to-market strategy/branding.
As you begin to develop closer relationships with collaborators both inside and outside the core organization, it becomes ever more obvious that finding better ways to sustainably work together will require much greater ongoing emphasis on mutual profitability and sharing of risks, resources, data, ideas and expertise.
Your extended enterprise competes against other extended enterprises.
The "core competencies" of each extended enterprise remain central to successfully achieving its primary mission, but you can make a strong case for procuring just about everything else from highly-trusted individuals/companies whose own "core competencies" enable them to best handle those particular functions and specialized activities.
Business process outsourcing (BPO) transfers non-primary-mission responsibilities to partner-minded allies whom you recruit to join your organization's extended enterprise.
Your entire supply chain and the individuals/companies that support your core enterprise must strive as one extended enterprise to collaboratively increase profits, gain market share and outperform not only your own direct competitors but also your competitors' supply chains and the supporting members of their extended enterprises.
Does it really matter from whom you buy and to whom you sell?
Unless your suppliers and your clients/customers proactively assist you in co-developing breakthrough innovations and in responding quickly to new opportunities with profitable first-to-market solutions, you should immediately seek to establish more productive relationships with different suppliers and different clients/customers.
You have to know -- better than anyone else -- your organization's core competencies and how they support the mission-critial activities of your clients/customers.
Similar to the manner in which you recruit and nurture your employees, you need to recruit and nurture the best-available members (including both suppliers and clients/customers) of your extended enterprise.
A competitive/collaborative intelligence advisory firm can offer some valuable assistance in helping you strategically align your own procurement-related functions, activities and relationships into partner-minded growth initiatives that not only reduce your average total costs but also measurably increase both your top-line and bottom-line results.
If you'd like to further explore BPO/co-branding and what it could mean for you and your organization, email peter@thusat.com or call Safos & Thusat, LLC at +1 216 221 1233.