What shape are your inter-enterprise relationships?

How do you line up with your key trading partners? Do you have a single point of contact between your two organizations, say a buyer or category manager and their sales rep? Or do you have much broader and more effective relationships?

Business processes and the flow of money, goods and information can span one or more organizations. By broadening your relationships you can ensure that these work smoothly and that any problems are caught early and solved without escalation, misunderstandings, frayed nerves and damaged relationships. The two sets of triangles represent the difference in approach. The set on the left represent a single point of contact between two organizations while the ones on the right the broader approach.

Here are some areas to consider. Not all are applicable to every circumstances but you will get the picture.

• Does your receiver have a relationship with your partner’s shipper? These can help with delayed orders, damaged shipments, rescheduled appointments and the like.
• Does your EDI coordinator have a relationship with theirs? Good relationships can sort out transmission problems, missing orders, unpaid invoices, grotty rounding errors on taxes and so on.
• Do your quality assurance people chat? If goods need to be quarantined, traced, or returned can they work quickly across your organizations?
• Are your demand planners sharing forecasts, exceptional needs, constrained supplies and so forth? Demand planning is needed in a number of situations beyond physical goods. Perhaps your rely on  consultants to run your IT projects and need to work with your suppliers to ensure your needs are met for numbers and skills. Are you a treasurer who needs to work with a financial institution to ensure your working capital needs are met?
• Do you have your suppliers work with you in competitive situations to ensure that you not only win the business but can be successful in execution?

Having a broad relationship doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a point person for the overall relationship but rather the point person should nurture the breadth of relationships.