Do You Really Want Your Sourcing Provider to be an Adversary?
January 7th, 2010By Kirk Laughlin, Editorial Director
One of the most heated, contentious and downright uncomfortable places outsourcers and their customers frequently find themselves is on the battleground of contract negotiations. Ever been part of one of these slugfests?
More than a few smart people in this industry have observed the sheer insanity of a customer beating on the head of a service provider while blissfully lacking recognition that the drive to lower cost may well have a direct impact on the quality of service delivery back to the customer. Outsource providers may have ruled the day ten years ago during the early growth years of the industry, but the pendulum has swung the other way in recent years, explains Richard Sandler, Vice President of Contracts for CSC’s Managed Services Sector, who has global responsibility for Contracts Management of all of CSC’s commercial outsourcing accounts.
I spoke to Richard recently about how much both sides of the outsourcing relationships are identifying innovation as a key goal on the roadmap toward a sustainable, fulfilling engagement. Sandler says that the “procurement mentality” still reigns in many customer organizations, pointing out that this approach can be quite damaging in the services sector where high value strategic contributions and mindshare are, in the end, what the end customer or business unit is really looking for. “The only way they can relate to procurement is to beat down on the vendors,” says Sandler. “For suppliers like us, we have a global infrastructure. It behooves both companies to work in a non-adversarial way.”
