The Inovis Blog

The Inovis support staff is reorganizing! just like we can reorganize the letters of “Inovis” into “Vision,” we are going to reorganize our staff to complement the vision of our product and services solutions! 

Effective November 1, 2007, the staff formerly known as the Support Organization will instead be recognized as the Solutions Center. The renaming of the customer support staff reinforces the Inovis support organization’s vision to not only support customers, but also emphasize providing solutions.

Staffing changes and training are big steps in the Support Staff’s makeover process. Existing team members in the L1 & L2 staff will be re-aligned based on services and software. This reorganization will create a team synergy between the L1 & L2 teams to faciliate ongoing knowledge transfer at an even faster pace. Staff members will gain confidence and certification in their knowledge before learning additional solution sets. I look forward to the Solution Center doing grand and great things for our customers. Salutations to the Solutions Center!

Steve and I had a great opportunity to be on a recorded webinar with Frank Quinn of Supply Chain Management Review. Frank is editorial director of Supply Chain Management Review and SupplyChainDaily.com, a new online source of personalized business information for supply chain professionals. Frank has been covering the supply chain and logistics scene for more than two decades. He just recently started blogging. I think highly of SCMR and would recommend subscribing to their blogs.

Since most of our customers are in manufacturing, also recommend the latest Capgemini Offshoring Evolution survey.

Stopped to sample the samosa at Whole Foods Market. Not good to shop on an empty stomach and fill the cart with snacks. They had free wifi for multitasking, but I picked up a section of the Wall Street Journal to get some ink on my fingers.

The samosas were good, but the stories listed in the Business Insights really got me salivating. They were listed by category: Marketing, Global Business, Finance, Technology and Operations; all subjects of great interest.

Spent more time reading than expected because all the stories were good. The one I want to share was under Operations: The Hand That Feeds You. Nancy W. Nix, Robert F. Lusch, Zach G. Zacharia and Wesley Bridges wrote it. They’re scholars and experts in the fields of marketing and collaborative supply chain management.

The article, if you haven’t read it, is an in-depth and insightful analysis of supplier collaborations and how some businesses succeed where many fail.

B2B collaboration is becoming critical aspect of global trading partners, as market competition gets increasingly fierce while customer demand grows. Research indicates that even as companies collaborate with suppliers to deliver goods and services better and faster to remain competitive, the failure rate is high.

They define collaboration as: an intense process where partners exchange information and pool their capabilities to solve problems that can’t be tackled individually.

They offer four elements critical to successful collaboration between companies, and five questions a company should ask themselves to make collaborations work. I’ve distilled them here.

1. Be Willing to Engage – This requires sharing of information, making joint decisions, and resolving conflicts.
2. Build a Collaborative Environment – Like building a brand, it’s important that the whole company is on board with the collaboration process. This may involve hiring people specially trained to manage the issues of collaboration.
3. Learn from Your Partner – Increasing knowledge base, and the ability to absorb knowledge is important for companies to get past the “that’s not the way we do things here” mentality.
4. Bring Expertise to the Table – It’s important that both parties bring something unique and of value to the collaboration, else the relationship becomes one-sided with one partner dependent on the other.

 The questions are:

1. Do you recognize when collaboration is needed vs. a more direct solution?
2. Is senior management committed to the process?
3. Can you improve on your collaborative team, and be willing to share information and ideas?
4. Are you open to new ideas, and willing to learn from partners?
5. Are you committed to making the relationship work?

This complete article, along with the others read with my samosas, can be accessed online at MIT Sloan Management Review.