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Day 28: Form a Strategic Partnership with your IWMS vendor

Networking has taken a giant leap forward over the last couple of years. Supported by rapid evolving internet technology, connections, alliances and partnerships are no longer solely bound by demographical locations.

The world has a lot of interesting organizations to offer that your organization might benefit from. One of those organizations should be your IWMS vendor. Instead of only having a vendor-customer relationship, both organizations could profit from forming a strategic partnership. Today’s post and teaching is about forming a strategic partnership with your IWMS vendor.

Today’s teaching

A strategic partnership is a formal alliance between two (or more) commercial enterprises, usually formalized by one or more business contracts but falls short of forming a legal partnership or, agency, or corporate affiliate relationship. (Wikipedia)

Strategic partnerships can be found in various formats although the most common ones include:

• Supplier / manufacturer partnering
• Capital / knowledge partnering
• Product diversification partnering

Within the workplace management domain a lot of strategic partnerships are formed between vendors of Integrated Workplace Management Systems and some of their customers, as there are a lot of benefits to forming such an alliance.

Benefits of strategic partnerships

“For complete strategies, as opposed to individual projects, creating option value means positioning the firm such that a wide array of opportunities become available”. Firms taking advantage of strategic partnerships can utilize other company’s strengths to make both firms stronger in the long run. (Grant 2008, p. 44) .

Strategic partnerships in the IWMS arena between vendors and customers are commonly formed based on product diversification. As workplace management is becoming more complex every day, it calls for new and better solutions in changing organizational conditions. Driven by this development Integrated Workplace Management Systems are becoming more complex as well.

The Research and Development departments of the big IWMS vendors try to adapt to the changing market conditions as fast as they can. Almost daily new software becomes available to implement at customers’ sites. However, in most cases this software is not entirely suited for the customer as IWMS vendors don’t have all specific expertise.

This is where are strategic partnership could be extremely useful. Testing of new software releases will be done by the vendor, but they need real life situations where new releases can be tested in production environments.

In addition to that, software vendors are usually willing to invest in software development and testing of new modules / solutions that will be developed in close cooperation with a customer.

Some of the benefits to strategic partnership with the IWMS vendor include:

• Cost sharing
• Knowledge sharing
• Expertise development
• Prototyping and real life testing
• Organization specific development
• Integrated delivery – coordinated efforts
• Product diversification

Challenges of strategic partnerships

Although there are a lot of benefits to strategic partnerships, it has some challenges as well. The most important ones include:

• More coordination
• More extensive consultation
• Communications
• Managing risks and maximizing benefits

When the challenges above are solved efficiently and correctly, strategic partnerships can prove to be very rewarding for both parties involved.

Today’s task

Your task today is to conduct an investigation about the possibility to form a strategic partnership with your IWMS vendor. Although not every organization is suited for partnership, most organizations have some leverage for IWMS vendors to be interested in partnering.

There are a few prerequisites to forming strategic partnerships:

Relevance

Strategic Partnerships should contribute to the goals of the organization. If your partnership will not contribute to your organizations goals, don’t form a partnership.

Size

IWMS vendors are more interested in large organizations as these are key to their strategy. Therefore size does matter. Unless your organization has very specific knowledge that can be reproduced and replicated at other customers’ implementations, partnerships with IWMS vendors are formed only by the larger organizations.

Mutual Benefit

If you want to partner with an IWMS vendor, you need to ensure that both parties can benefit from the partnership. If you do not have something to offer, IWMS vendors will not partner with your organization. On the other hand, you also need to be able to benefit from the partnership.

Commitment

Strategic partnerships can only be successful when both parties are committed to make the partnership to a success. If there is no commitment, don’t form a partnership.