Implementing and Managing Collaborative Relationships: A Practical Guide for Managers

In today’s competitive, globalized marketplace, the provision of services and products is a result of teamwork between several organizations. Relationships between organizations of any size are strategically important. If your supplier falls down at a crucial moment, it can have survival implications for your company or for other members of your supply chain. The management of these strategic assets cannot be left to chance and the same attention that you devote to finance, operations, HR, etc. must be applied to business relationships. Despite this, very few organizations focus on this or are even aware that they need to do it. Those that do are unsure how to do it. This is not helped by business schools that focus on either customer relationship management (CRM) or supplier relationship management (SRM) rather than collaboration between partners (Enterprise Relationship Management).

This book is a unique "go-to" guide for all managers who should be looking at collaboration with other organizations as a new way to attain outstanding results that would not be achieved on their own. Currently, there is nothing else of this nature on the market.

The book identifies relationship management as a pivotal management function. It presents a comprehensive, flexible, end-to-end management process that can be easily incorporated into the existing management structures. Further, they describe the crucial role of the relationship manager who is at the heart of the system and provides the drive to achieve high performance. Any company can tailor this discipline to the needs of its organization – whether an SME or a multi-national company selecting a new partner or managing existing relationships.

This book covers the decision of whether or not to partner and with whom, the creation of an appropriate system of governance, the transition to operations, managing performance for continuous improvement, and, finally, controlled wind-up of the partnership.

Throughout, diagrams to signpost the sequence of activities, checklists of important actions, and job-related worksheets are provided. In addition, there are numerous case studies in a variety of industries and public sectors that will be used as illustrations. Altogether these make this book ideally suitable for experienced managers as well as for training and induction purposes.

Essentially, Implementing and Managing Collaborative Relationships: A Practical Guide for Managers shows managers how they can create and operate a simple and effective system of Enterprise Relationship Management that will enable them to maximize efficiency, resilience, innovation, and profitability.

Dr Andrew S Humphries MBA, PhD is CEO of SCCI Ltd, a company that specializes in performance improvement within complex, commercial and government relationships. Over the last 15 years, He has worked with a wide variety of organizations in Europe, Asia and Australia using PartnerLink, a scientific process that clearly identifies partnering performance drivers and opportunities for improvement. As a result, he has enabled many to achieve significantly enhanced collaborative effectiveness and bottom-line benefits. He retired from the UK RAF in 2004 as Head of Policy for Defence Aviation Logistics. He has over 35 years of experience as a practical military logistics manager and director. Andrew gained his Ph.D. from Cranfield School of Management, the UK in 2003 and has published widely. His books Strategic Alliances and Marketing Partnerships (Kogan Page 2009), Collaborative Change (2010) and Enterprise Relationship Management (Gower 2015) demonstrate the importance of applying a management discipline to ensure the success of collaborative relationships, alliances, and partnerships.

Linda McComie, MBA is the Director and co-founder with Andrew Humphries of SCCI Ltd. Over the last 16 years, she has piloted and co-developed the SCCI toolset with Andrew. She has been actively promoting the use and continuous development of collaborative working with both managers and business schools. Her work with SMEs has been particularly successful, where client organizations grew by 33% year on year over a three-year monitored period. She is a former Senior Manager in the UK Finance, Manufacturing, and Employment sectors and has worked extensively with blue-chip companies to improve the performance of their alliances and collaborative partnerships. Linda gained her MBA from the Open University Business School in 1994. She is the co-author of the SCCI Simple Guide to Collaboration series of books.