Strategic Supply Chain Management - Supply Chain Online

CHAPTER 4 Core Discipline 4: Build the Right Collaborative Model 167
FIGURE 4–6
A collaboration guideline.
❏ You may have a grandiose vision for the future, but your chances of
success are small if you try to go for “collaboration nirvana” from
the start. Start with tactical improvements.
❏ Focus on a single, unambiguous vision for your collaboration
strategy, including clear goals and a purpose.
❏ Clearly understand your company’s current and future desired core
competencies, and ensure that the collaboration strategy is wholly
consistent.
❏ Start small, focusing on a limited set of capabilities, on selected
partner candidates, and on selected tasks.
❏ Recognize that early efforts can be supported by a manual
infrastructure (phone/fax/email); more extensive efforts will certainly
require more advanced supporting systems. So pay close attention
to how the systems will need to evolve.
❏ Let your business drivers and economic realities shape the nature of
your collaborative relationships and the way they will be managed.
❏ Advance your technological capabilities only to the level that you
expect your partners to be able to manage.
❏ Assess the organizational changes that will be needed to support
collaboration on a larger scale in parallel with your initial efforts.
❏ Align your company’s compensation and reward structure to the
goals of the collaboration strategy.
❏ Effectively manage your collaboration partners; have a
comprehensive metrics program in place that allows you to monitor
their performance—and your own—on a regular basis.
❏ Don’t take people out of the equation. Stories abound about
companies who “flipped the switch” on new collaboration tools, only
to find that the system was recommending actions that made no
sense from a business perspective. As your effort gets underway,
make sure your organization is populated with skilled professionals
that can monitor progress and make necessary midcourse
corrections.