mitigate these impacts?
; How have you categorized and classified the goods, services, and suppliers that
make your business operate? Do you distinguish among levels of business critical-ity, product complexity, corporate mission
impacts, and the like?
; How do you manage supplier/provider performance—to contract, on specific
goods or services—to both achieve performance targets and to demonstrate capability to your peers and superiors? How do you
publicize the results of these efforts?
THE NEVER-ENDING QUEST
The question-and-answer drill can go on
and on. At core, though, is a frightening
reality. How well you partner with peers,
such as legal and others, will, to an extent
not always understood, define how successfully your end-to-end supply chain
operates.
With legal as a permanent adversary,
you are guaranteed to lose. With legal as a
flexible and knowledgeable ally, you have
a fighting chance at supply chain success.
Wars have losers; we all know that. But
it is not important that you might win and
legal (or another function) lose. In war,
even the victor loses. Loses support, loses
resources, loses credibility, loses focus—
all very real possibilities with very real
consequences.
Perhaps in a geopolitical arena, wars
are sometimes necessary and unavoidable.
In our world of integrated supply chain
management, peace, teamwork, and collaboration can make winners of us all—our
function, our supply chain, our peers, our
customers (both internal and external),
and our supplier/provider bases.
And then, we will not have to face the
I-told-you-so specter of Nebuchadnezzar
beating our brains out and throwing us in
jail, or worse.
Note: A version of this column appears on
the Spend Matters blog site.
; Do you use one contract template, with universal language, to
control all goods and services provisions? Does this cause confusion—
say, in holding HR consultants to
the same bonding,
licensure, and insur-
ance provisions as
those who build nucle-
ar power operations?
; Is legal attempting to guard against
all risks of all types
and all sizes in all contracts? Does legal work
with you to tailor individual contracts to manage reasonable risk
in the activity, material, product,
or service involved—and does that
process include definition of a specific supplier’s profile and history?
; Do you find it difficult to find
disadvantaged business enterprises
(DBEs) willing to bid in your envi-
ronment? Are you falling short of
DBE contracting goals?
; Are your “requirements” elim-
inating DBEs from the acceptable
bidding pool? Do they also dis-
courage all but the
largest providers from
proposing services or
providing goods and
materials?
; Do your internal
customers’ traditions
and preferences along
with legal’s require-
ments erect barriers
to entry for smaller, less tradi-
tional, and possibly disadvantaged
enterprises?
; Has your working relationship
with legal affected your internal
interactions with other functions,
e.g., HR, IT, real estate, field oper-
ations, manufacturing, finance, and
accounting? What have you done to
b
as
ict
ra
i
n
i
n
g
Art van Bodegraven may be reached at (614) 893-9414 or
avan@columbus.rr.com. You can read his blog at http://
blogs.dcvelocity.com/the_art_of_art/. Kenneth B. Ackerman,
president of The Ackerman Company, can be reached at (614)
