Your suppliers are doing an ok job. Monthly SLAs’ are green, you’re 2 maybe 3 years into contract, which is tracking all baseline and forecast indicators. Things are generally rolling along.

But something’s just not right. It’s all very tactical and uninspiring. Appetite for exploring value-add feels stale, hard-coded by long standing legacy routine as well as a lack of imagination for embracing and researching new and uncharted ideas. Instead this profit centre largely remains untapped.

Indeed the most attritional relationships can report green on monthly SLAs’. There’s no room for grey in SLAs – they are blunt instruments.

Scratching the Surface

SLAs’ are key to maintaining levels of core service (whatever they happen to be) but are generally considered binary as they essentially consist of yes or no answers. A service is beyond 98% for green, or it’s not. Non-functional requirements such as hours of service are either compliant, or they aren’t.

Dig Deeper

Whereas in fact there tends to be a wealth of untapped intelligence based opportunity hidden deep inside most engagements just like the ones we’ve described. This wealth of opportunity for value creation resides crucially inside relationship and behaviour led (a.k.a highly subjective) components or channels that span the entire service environment.

4 Pillars

These channels when assembled form the framework of the engagement. In the world of Suppeco we call this the dynamic Infrastructure. This is typically the area of any engagement that lacks the system of baselined measure-ability It’s important to apply meaningful structure and process to any engagement to create this workable infrastructure. Suppeco does the heavy lifting here; by generating dynamic baselines to support collaboration, measurement, assessment, reporting, as well as of course the vitally important mechanisms for driving improvement.

Smart KPI engine

Of course we appreciate as we carry out our every day operational activities that we don’t ‘live’ within the confines (or the pages) of a commercially or legally drafted contract. That’s simply unrealistic. Moreover everything that happens within a live operational environment is invariably subject to something. There are any number of circumstances that can and will influence all areas of service performance.

That’s not to say that SLAs’ won’t continue to report green; it does however signify that if we fail to apply these collaborative improvement mechanisms to the environment, the underlying issues may go unchallenged and will continue to have a detrimental effect on important areas of service and the relationship, preventing our ability to capitalise on an infinite array of opportunity otherwise available to us.

Contact the Suppeco team. Arrange a demo, and see how our SRM solution can help create opportunities for value creation within your organisation.