With the EU referendum just a few months away, David Cameron and his pro-EU peers need to do everything they can to remind businesses of the outsourcing and trade benefits that come with remaining in Europe.
University of London Professor David Faulkner has written extensively about the need for cooperative, rather than purely competitive, strategic business relationships and alliances. Since the early 1990s Faulkner has studied the “essence” of competitive strategy, and the challenges involved in integrating cooperation as part of the competitive mindset. One of his books is International Strategic Alliances: Cooperating to Compete (1995). The strategies of cooperation has been his most common theme.
Earlier today, I had the honour of delivering the final presentation at the Sourcing Industry Group (SIG)‘s latest London Regional Roundtable – this time round, actually, a joint effort with the wonderful folks at the Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE), which also comprised the ACTE London Corporate Travel Procurement Forum.
The days of paying supply chain outsourcers by number of FTEs are on their way out. In that purely cost-based model, the OEM’s interests – keeping hours low to contain costs – are inherently pitted against their managed service provider’s – putting more FTEs on a project to maximise revenue. Instead, OEMs are now exploring outcome-based models, where sellers become partners who share the risks and rewards of achieving their goals.
While there is a lot of focus and discussion on how to outsource the right way and bring business value, a very common mistake many companies make is around ignoring how outsourced services are orchestrated with the functions of the retained organisation(s) to provide business with a seamless “IT experience”.
For all the many successes of outsourcing, it’s not all sweetness and light… As promised a couple of weeks ago, here’s another installment of our Top Ten series featuring some of the most outstanding, damning, incendiary (and at times remarkably poetic) insults from the global outsourcing community. The more sensitive amongst you should look away now…
There is a fiction that suggests that business decisions are made on purely utilitarian grounds. Psychologists have shown convincingly that people value the avoidance of loss far more highly than capturing gains. There are many and significant implications for those seeking to implement change, particularly in an agile environment.
The Agile Manifesto
Every once in a while I come across a situation marked with incongruous and unexpected elements that, when summed up, can only be labelled as completely bizarre. One such situation started in the boardroom of Walker Ideas, a very successful inside-outsourcing service provider to the food industry. Walker operates at dozens of facilities dedicated to performing services that their customers strategically exited. As such, Walker is a key partner to their customers, or so they allow themselves to believe.
It’s the first thing millennials see in the morning, the last thing they look at before going to bed, and their constant companion throughout the day. It’s their phone. The younger generation’s dependency on mobile is driven by the considerable role technology plays in our everyday lives. With the touch of a button, these young men and women can do anything from ordering a car or depositing a check to sharing photos, videos and stories with friends and the public at large.
Parseq is set for further expansion in Sunderland following a multi-million pound increase in business from contract wins which will see the firm create more than
I often get asked whether managed service is just hype and nothing but glorified “time and material” (T&M) in a different guise. Usually we understand a managed service to be measured, and paid for, based on a pre-defined effort and output for the work in hand, as opposed to T&M which is a simple calculation of the amount of time taken multiplied by the rate card value, plus the cost of any materials consumed. The simple answer is that it is hype if it is not done properly.
Three blogs in already and we have yet to tackle the elephant in the room: what precisely is robotic process automation (RPA)?
Caroline Allen is the European Regional Director for the Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE), which has partnered with the Sourcing Industry Group (SIG) on SIG’s next London Regional Roundtable (taking place March 15). We got together with Caroline to find out more about her association, and why the partnership makes sense for travel professionals and procurement specialists alike.
A couple of years ago, as part of our ongoing Top Ten series we published a collection of some of the finest, most cutting terms of abuse ever heard in a professional environment (soon to be followed by a second): along with transforming the global business landscape, members of the outsourcing community certainly appear to possess world-class talents in the fields of invective, calumny and scorn…
You’ve all been told that to create value in your negotiations and get the “best” deal for your organization you need to expand the pie, not just haggle over the limited and fixed number of pie pieces. But no one has really demonstrated pie expansion – value – for commercial contracts – until now.
