The Importance of Strategic Relationships
The trend towards commitment to core competencies will continue – both for financial reasons but also for competitive reasons. The acceleration of innovation across landscapes will force typical practitioners and even 3PLs to exploit the intellectual property being developed in order to remain competitive and relevant. In doing so, a re-evaluation of supply chain ecosystems and strategic partnerships will be critical.
For basic needs in areas of isolated functionality (ie fairly self-contained processes), ERPs are often the preferred approach. Emerging SaaS providers, however, often offer strong alternatives, and while ERPs will tout the ease of integration, this is often over-stated. Evaluating the total cost of ownership over an extended lifecycle may align with a simplified architecture where SaaS applications are removed from major upgrade efforts of ERPs.
In more complex environments, vendors of the software themselves, and for those customers that have opted for aggressive ERP-first strategies or best of suite providers for more holistic engagement, the interconnectivity across applications and intelligence driven by it will be sure to provide benefits. A focus on ML and AI from these providers may develop cross-functional optimization and advanced alerting and issue remediation capabilities. For larger customers, opportunities for co-innovation of productized capabilities is highly compelling.
Elsewhere, the ability of specialized services providers to familiarize themselves with your environment will drive supportability and customer satisfaction (you and yours). More importantly, they offer opportunities to finely tune your solutions to your business. The relationship begins at implementation and if delivered with the appropriate strategy and planned levels of governance, incentivization, and communication, will provide value throughout an extended product lifecycle. When considering candidates, be sure to vet industry experience and commitment as it will not only reduce risk but will increase the opportunities for supplemental benchmarking and innovation.
Many new startups join large legacy consultancies with a focus on machine learning, AI, and specialized IOT insights.These will round out the partner ecosystem. Again, industry focused solutions will accelerate fit for purpose innovation.
