Suppliers and Contractors - How to Get the Best from Local Providers

Outsourcing is growing faster than ever.  You may see your local providers as external suppliers and contractors; your customers see them as an intrinsic part of your service.  If your providers are underperforming, your customers will see you underperforming.
 
Delivering a product or service is just the first step.  Your providers must also align with your company’s broader goals: customer satisfaction, sustainable development, corporate social responsibility.  This alignment is especially important when you’re drawing up service contracts or managing repetitive projects.
 
Continually changing your providers is not the answer.
 
The best results grow out of long-term collaborative partnerships.  How to establish and nurture them?  Front-line staff are as crucial to the process as senior management; at the least, they play a key role in working alongside your providers; at best, they can champion excellence.
 
This stimulating course goes far beyond the usual ‘supplier selection’ procedures.  True collaboration can yield significant mutual benefits: increased efficiency, improved quality, innovation.  The skills needed to achieve those benefits are technical and managerial: the skills of rational evaluation and subtle persuasion.  In this course, you’ll discover how to manage change and generate shared commitment throughout the outsourcing network.

We have designed this course for both management and front-line staff with responsibility for managing contractors and suppliers. It will also be of interest to any manager about to be promoted to any of these roles, and to graduates on fast-track development routes.



By the end of the course, participants will be able to;

• Identify their organisation’s objectives in engaging local providers
• Gather and interpret information relevant to those objectives
• Identify the needs of key stakeholders for the product or service being supplied
• Devise and apply an effective procedure to select local providers
• Draw up and supervise contracts to meet the organisation’s needs and expectations
• Prepare action plans to improve relationships with local providers

Participants will consider and evaluate:

• tools and techniques to select suitable suppliers and contractors
• processes to identify key areas in the performance of the contract
• a systematic approach to developing contractor capability
• methodologies for measuring improvements in contractor performance
• an understanding of the local provider's point of view
• influencing methods to get contractors and suppliers to improve
• the ability to develop relationships within a professional context
• practical change management tools