The Inovis Blog

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.