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Partnerships or Competition?
Competition, taking sides, winners and losers or true partners taking things forward for common good? My thoughts on this started off from work I’m doing for a client where we have some EU competition issues, and then I read a tweet from Cathy Hayward where someone had mentioned the reaction of their purchasing team to talk of partnerships.
I’m often labelled as a Purchasing Expert, but it is just one thing that I have experience of. I see myself more as a businessman who has, over the years variously been John the Buyer, John the Salesman and finally John the Operations guy trying to deliver what the Sales people have sold with what the Buying people have bought for me. It ain’t easy, believe me, but I’ve made a decent living along the way and had a lot of fun.
One of the things that can hold a business back is functions not getting on, so let’s look at the three tribes:
Purchasing people tend to thrive on the competitive element of their profession. Keeping the market on its toes and keeping their pencils sharp so that the best deals are struck. Shaking up the mix is what it’s all about.
Operations people prefer an element of stability so that they can build up working relationships with both customers and suppliers and have enough other issues that bring instability to the daily lives without any artificial stimulus.
So where does that leave Sales people? On the one hand they want the stability because they can build relationships, cross sell and have a quiet life enjoying the expense account and the Mondeo but, on the other hand, if there is too much stability, how do they break into new markets and clients? It’s ironic, but they actually need the world that the buyers are trying to create because that instability is a major source of opportunity.
Competition does mean that there will be winners and losers, and there is nothing wrong in that. It is a fact of nature that we can see all around us any day of the week if we bother to look. The plant life that we all pass by daily reminds us of how the struggle for survival works and it is foolish to ignore that competition is a fundamental element of what has made humans what we are. Look at the stupidities of trying to eliminate the competitive element factor from schools as a prime example of where that leads.
Whilst competition is good there is also strength in combining efforts to work towards common good. For me the point about competition is that it has its place, but collaboration does too.
Like so many things, competition is a tool and, like all tools, you need to use it well and in the right circumstances. I could buy the best saw on the market, but if I went down to the lumber yard and bought a dozen different sorts of timber there is a fair chance that I would ruin both my new saw and some of the wood in short order because you need even different saws for different woods.
So blindly applying competition to sourcing needs is as much of a waste (and don’t get me started on e-auctions) as trying to do fret work with a panel saw. The art of good buying is to use the right method for each requirement. If you can do that then the right deals will generally fall into place.
So to get it right requires collaboration between good people, but isn’t that always the way?
Put people at the heart of what you are doing
It’s all about the people. Not the first time I’ve covered this, nor will it be the last, but a few things have drawn me back to this subject. First off sorting out a problem for a client where things had bogged down into an email war. This must be the modern equivalent of trench warfare; you dig into your position and hurl stuff at the other party who is equally well dug in on their side. No-one wins. After two weeks of cyber missives flying back and forth the problem was solved in 45 minutes face to face working around the table.
The next day came another example of the power of people. A client has a supplier problem where legal people are involved on both sides, but half an hour on the phone has seen the first progress for about 10 days. Once again you get things moving when people start to talk and work with each other.
Humans are social animals and we like to congregate of our own accord, but we also have the problem in some countries, the UK being one, where we are all thrown together because there are so many of us in a small space and are forced to get along. Making it easy for us to do what we need to do helps remove some of the frustrations that cause problems between people. If the roads are not clogged we don’t get road rage, for example.
And that brings me on to the role of facilities management people. We have our definitions of FM, and they are fair enough, but since I’ve been involved in FM I’ve seen the role as one of facilitation to a large degree. The make it easy for the people in the building to do what they come there for. When you go to work there are lots of little things that can act like a handful of sand in the gearbox; no one grain will break it, but the combined effect will be to wear it out quickly. Problems at work have the same effect. The copier won’t work, the lift is out of order again, the car park is always flooded (see last week’s Musing) and so on.
All of these distract people from doing what they are there to do and make them less productive. Amongst other things FM sorts all of that out. It’s people working with and for each other gives you team work and synergy, the sum of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.
The buildings and the technology are just tools. If no-one uses them they will just sit there and crumble away eventually, but they are created by people. It’s people that have the great ideas to move things forward and it’s other people that have the skills to translate the ideas into physical reality. So why do we so often forget that it is people that will have to use what we create?
All too often I see projects where there is some glorious aim in mind, but none of it gives much thought to the people that will have to work with or around it. New shiny technology is bought and deployed without any real thought of the people who it will be inflicted on. How many new buildings have I spent the first year on just making them user friendly?
People power is huge (just look at Egypt right now) so make it work. Put human interaction at the heart of what you do and you won’t go too far wrong.
what will people remember you for?
“At least you sorted the drains out”. Will that be my epitaph?
The comment came during a chance meeting with someone who worked for me twenty odd years ago, but whom I’ve not seen for five or six years. It refers to an incident at a site that I had taken over running the operations at and where there had been a perennial problem with flooding. I had been standing in the car park in the aftermath of the first big summer storm following a project to fix the problems admiring the gently steaming tarmac when my boss squared walked quietly up behind me and said, “There may be doubts as to whether or not Mussolini made the trains run on time, but at least you’ll be able to claim that you made the drains work as your legacy to mankind”.
To set out to leave some form of legacy by which you will be remembered may not be a bad thing, but it does require elements of conceit and vanity (both of which I plead guilty of from time to time). The danger comes when those vices get in the way of what you are trying to deliver and the end result becomes more about you than those who might otherwise benefit, and I’ve seen that blight often enough to be wary of it in anything that I set out to achieve these days.
As a young man I can remember being told of the bucket of water test. You plunge in both hands and swirl for all you are worth, but so quickly after you take your hands out do those waters become still again leaving no trace of your efforts. Along the same lines I am minded of an old Scots lament:
“Mony’s the ane for him makes mane, But nane sall ken whar he is gane.
Ower his white bones, when they are bare, The wind sall blaw for evermair”.
Very few people do something that leaves a long term mark, and often those that do are those who had the fortune to have circumstances collide with need rather than any plans for greatness coming to fruition. Cometh the hour, cometh the man sort of thing.
Maybe it is more the little things that you do that will make a difference. I sorted the drains by getting a CCTV survey done rather that spending a 5 figure sum every year on jet blasting as my predecessors had done. That meant that I could invest money in the two or three areas where there was a major problem and get them fixed properly. It worked and a significant irritant for the 1300 or so people who worked on the site went away.
That is classic facilities management stuff; making life better for the workers helps productivity and better productivity means more profitable business, more satisfied customers and all of those fine things. Facilities management people fix stuff. As Dara O’Briain said when he provided the entertainment at the BIFM Awards dinner a few years ago, we are like the fairies at the bottom of the garden, doing things un-noticed.
So we have a lesson in humility maybe? It isn’t about the individual so much as the part that the individual plays in their environment and the contribution that they make.
But the other lesson here is a leadership one. Recognition is a powerful reward: I got a nice glow from someone remembering and saying so. Why not thank someone today, and maybe your legacy will be to be remembered as a nice person. I’d settle for that.
how easy is it to buy from you 2 – sell me the deal
Continuing my theme of last week, let’s look at the stages of a typical B2B purchasing exercise.
The common problem that you encounter in these situations is that the company is trying so hard to sell to you that they frequently miss the point completely. They are so busy telling you how wonderful they are that they make it hard for you to buy from them, and the further you get into the process the worse they get.
At the pre-qualification stage you are seeking information, so case studies and some background on the supplier in terms of their customer base is needed, but you are looking for objective evidence of capability and capacity, not subjective advertising puff. All too often what you’re given is more towards the latter than the former.
When it comes down to the tender you have already narrowed down your possible to the ones that you have identified as capable of doing the job, but you can reckon on getting reams of sales pitch, including repeating most of what you’ve already had, to wade through as you try to find the convincing arguments that this is the bid that you should really be accepting. Why they do this is a mystery, but you can almost guarantee that you’re going to get it. The black humour in this is that, along with this blatant waste of paper, there will almost certainly be something there explaining their green credentials. Now and again you get someone who avoids the sales pitch and just sells you the solution to your problem, but this just isn’t that common.
Next up will be conducting supplier visits, and these will include both the supplier’s premises and one or more of their current customers. The purpose of these visits is to validate the supplier’s ability to service my client. I’m looking for demonstrable evidence that they can do what they say they can, that they are already doing it for someone else and how well it is being done. Now the clever supplier will just let you get on and see whatever you want to, warts and all, and will be prepared to have a sensible discussion on the good and the bad. Mostly though you get the sanitised tour, and that overlooks one of the key things that people want to buy into; honesty.
Then we get to the short listed suppliers presenting. You have, say, forty five minutes to convince you that they should be the chosen one; half an hour to present and fifteen minutes of questions maybe? Now thirty minutes is not long, so what should happen is to focus in on how they will do for you what you have asked for in the tender. Start with a quick intro to the problem, the meat of the session on how they will solve that problem, and a quick sum up of the key points. But all too often the first half of the presentation is made up prom the standard sales slide set and then they rush faster and faster through the rest with all of the slides on your requirements vanishing in a blur.
You are being scored at all of these stages. If you want the deal, then focus on what is going to get points on the board and put all of your efforts there.
Make it easy to buy from you: We put you on the list because we are convinced that you could do the job. What we need from there on is convincing why we should engage you and not the others.
how easy is it to buy from you?
I understand that you need to have a set of processes to enable your company to run, and some of these will be around ordering, pick, pack, despatch and customer enquiries. This is a particular area of my own expertise, but why do you inflict this stuff on the customer?
Buying on line shows up the worst of this for me. Some examples:
• Crude product search engines that give you almost the entire inventory regardless of what you ask for.
• Page links that don’t work.
• Where you view the product, select a quantity to buy, get through a convoluted checkout process and only then get told that it is out of stock.
• Convoluted checkout process.
• Contact Us links that don’t work.
• Drop down lists in the Contact Us section that never seem to cover the query type that I have.
• Comment boxes that only allow too few characters for your query
Some company web sites are great; Amazon for example, but others are dreadful. Amazon relieve me of a lot of my disposable cash because they make it easy for me to spend with them and the overall customer experience is great.
On the other hand there are at least two or three companies a month that fail to extract funds from me because I can’t be bothered to go through all the hassle. Do people at these companies ever consider the customer experience? Do they ever try to buy from themselves? Somehow I doubt it.
And it isn’t just web sites. A lot of face to face experiences are no better. Two big gripes here; firstly the assistant who has to finish talking to their colleague when you’ve obviously arrived, and are waiting, to ask a question, and those places where you can’t enjoy looking without assistant after assistant walking up and asking if you need help.
OK, so all of that is B2C, but what about B2B? Well in many cases that is no better. Web links that don’t work, “Contact Us” buttons that either give you an email address with a promise to get back to you within 2 business days(!) or a phone number to a call centre somewhere that doesn’t even seem sure if the company you’ve called exists, let alone what they do.
Some web sites are so hard to navigate you doubt that you really want to deal with the company; if the web site is so badly organised, what are their other business practices like? For a start make sure that there is a consistent way of navigating around your site. Next, if you are going to engage with people on the web then you need to put something on there that people can play with and find things out. You also need to have something useful behind the contact details so that when someone does get in touch they get prompt responses. We’re using the web for its immediacy, so keep the ball rolling.
The next area that drives me to distraction is how hard some people make it to pay them. In this day and age a bank transfer is quick and easy, as is using a corporate purchasing card, so why are so many people still asking you to put a cheque on the post?
Generally there is room for improvement, so come on people. Get some thinking done on how people can trade with you. Things may be tight currently, but there is some money out there to be spent so make it easy for folks to spend it with you.
will Supplier Relationship Management be the big thing in 2011?
Revenue is one of the key components of profit, and therefore its perceived position as the lifeblood on business is reflected in the amount of money spent on trying to generate it; sales and marketing, and all of their associated costs make a reasonable dent in a company’s expenditure and so does the amount spent on training the people involved. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a big thing.
Now profit, as we all know, is what’s left over from the income when you’ve paid all your bills, but it is cash flow, or rather lack of it, which is the biggest killer of business. So you need profit underpinned by a healthy cash flow to survive, and cash flow is kept healthy by making sure that you’ve got your income in the bank in time to pay your bills.
And yet so many businesses just miss the whole point. They focus fairly lavish attention on bringing money in with little thought as to what is going out beyond the occasional budget cut or belt tightening exercise.
One of the key problems is silo mentality. When I am working with a group of buyers I’ll always ask how they see the sales teams that they have to deal with. The response is usually fairly hostile and rarely complimentary, but when you point out that they also have a sales team it comes over as though you’ve just told them that they have an uncle in gaol for murder.
It isn’t quite as bad talking to sales people about buyers, but both sides miss two important points. Firstly that the business that they work for will have both buyers and sellers that should be joined up and secondly that whilst the one group is trying to apply CRM to the buyers that they deal with, the other group is having CRM applied to them, but usually with little being done to equip them to get the best out of it. (In the reverse direction we call it Supplier Relationship Management or SRM).
You will also find frequent examples of buyers and sellers working against each other. Not deliberately of course, but because there isn’t sufficient recognition of the business drivers nor recognition of each other’s roles. In the service sector I’ve often seen companies that have sold solutions against a set of service levels that their supply contracts can’t sustain. Both sides are getting a pat on the back for the respective deals and nobody sees the conflict until sometime downstream when the end client is getting dissatisfied.
It should come as no surprise that the best examples of companies that balance efforts on what they spend and what they earn are often in the retail sector. Just think Tesco or Wal*Mart for example. They both manage their supply chains very well, and there is a constant and positive dialogue between all the various functions. Everyone is focused on taking revenue and squeezing as much value as they can from the transactions.
So here’s something that you can do this coming year. Buyers and sellers, seek each other out in your business and start having some meaningful dialogue. You will better understand how you can help each other succeed on behalf of your employer, but you can also help each other understand how the other works.
SRM is a very worthwhile area to be investing in. I’ve written here about collaboration being a way to move forward from recessionary times and working together in the supply chain is common sense anyway. I think that SRM could be a big thing in 2011.
could you manage a little consideration and tolerance in the season of goodwill?
People seem to see things in such black and white terms these days. You love it or you hate it, or something is right or wrong with nothing in between. But is that really true? No of course it isn’t, but why can’t people be bothered to come to a considered decision.
What started me off on this topic was the Vince Cable affair of last week where yet another scam interview had elicited some ill judged remarks and Mr Cable was being pilloried. Now I don’t know the guy, and haven’t really paid too much attention to what he’s been up to since being thrust into office, but I do appreciate what the Government is trying to do in terms of getting us out of the hole the other mob had dug us into and my impressions of Mr C were that he wasn’t doing too badly in playing his part. But does what he said suddenly turn him into such a villain? I don’t think so, especially when compared with some of the conduct we have seen from public figures over the last 15 years or so.
As people we are not necessarily all good or all bad. Doing one good thing or making one mistake doesn’t necessarily move us far in one direction or the other either. There are degrees in all of these things that we ought to allow for.
Love and hate are very powerful emotions and are polar extremities with a wide spectrum in between, so why do people want to only be at one or other end of that range? I doubt that they really are, it’s just another example of poor use of language, exaggerating for effect rather than anything else. Personally I made a conscious effort to avoid hate a long time ago. It seemed like such a waste to me to hate something; to be generating the necessary degree of rage that would go with hate consumes so much energy that can be put to more positive things. I try not to even use the word in every day speech.
It is perfectly possible to neither like nor dislike something, or to just like or dislike something a little. You can like something some of the time, but not all of the time. There is no reason to even be consistent, let alone extreme, about these things. In the same way, right and wrong are not always absolutes. Context plays a big part in understanding these things and that is where consideration and judgement come in.
Perhaps this is all just semantics and maybe the words don’t really matter, but I think that they do. If folks were to apply consideration and judgement a little more (are you listening Vince?) they could be a little more rational perhaps? One of my great sadness’s about modern Britain is in how selfish and inconsiderate people have become, so any move to improve that would have my support.
I wrote recently about the pendulum effect whereby allowing things to go to one extreme causes the inevitable backswing to the opposite end of the arc, and suggested that a bit more time in the tolerant middle ground would be beneficial in maintaining a more balanced and stable society.
Things aren’t always black or white, and things can, sometimes, be partly right or partly wrong. In the season of peace and goodwill my message is let’s all try to weigh things a little, be a bit more tolerant of others and to see things in a few shades of grey, or even a little colour.
A #facilitiesmanagement Christmas Tale
‘Twas Christmas Eve at the office. As the sky began to lighten that morning, Bob the Facilities Manager sat in reception waiting for the receptionist to arrive and take over the desk. On the CCTV monitors he saw the black Audi A6 of the CEO glide up to the gate. His hand went to the control panel to press the gate open button for her – she never used her identity badge – but then he froze. From the driver’s window a pale hand emerged and wafted a small white rectangle at the sensor. The gate rose and the Audi entered the car park. Mesmerised, he followed the car on the cameras until it parked. Sure enough it was the right person driving. The angle she parked at would have been enough to show that, but the lady herself emerged and headed for the door.
Normally he would have made himself scarce at this point to avoid having any contact with her as she passed through reception. Not that she ever acknowledged him, but there was often something that had pricked her bile and some order would be barked out as she swept through. Today though he sat rooted as she emerged from the revolving door and flashed him as wide smile. “Good morning Bob. I seem to have parked across two spaces. Do you think you could get it straightened up for me?” she enquired, dangling her car keys at him.
After Joan had arrived to take over reception Bob went through to make them both a drink. As he waited for the kettle to boil he wondered at the CEO’s behaviour. A voice interrupted his reveries and he turned to face the HR Director. “Ah, Bob. I’ve got six new people starting and you need to get things set up for them”. “OK, when are they starting” Bob enquired, thinking that, at least, it can’t be today. “Not ‘til early Feb, but I thought that you might have a look up on the third floor and see where we may be able to fit them in. I’ve got the names and photos we took at their interviews so I’ll email those to you so that you can sort out ID cards and things” came the response. “Er, thanks” said Bob. He’d been expecting something as his team had seen all the candidates come in for their interviews, but six weeks notice to sort out things out? Unheard of; he didn’t usually get six days.
He took the teas back to reception. As he handed over her mug Joan passed him a post it note. “Old tight wad is on her way down” she told him. Tight wad was their name for the Finance Director. He stifled the retort he was about to make as a diminutive figure in an immaculate trouser suit emerged from the lift and came their way, offering Good Mornings” to them both. She held out the buff file she carried “Your 2011/12 budgets are all approved, so you can get cracking on your programme any time you like. The directors have also agreed to give up their designated car park spaces and to go open plan. It’s all there for you to start work on in January”. They sat open mouthed watching her go.
Mrs Bob came home to find her husband fast asleep in his armchair. A piece of paper had fallen from his hand; it was the list of jobs she’d left him to do. As she looked at him he seemed to be smiling. At least someone’s having sweet dreams she thought.
avoiding the swings and the roundabouts and getting things done
I was discussing here the other week how business goes round in circles; the pendulum swings from one way of working to another and back again, and I argued that we needed to be less reactive. It’s a question of balance.
Conversations arising from that blog suggested that I was against radical change, but I’m not when it is necessary. If you have to swerve to avoid someone then it makes sense to do so rather that endure a painful collision. However, I would ask the question, why did you not see them coming earlier?
This is getting to the heart of running any operation, and those of us in #facilitiesmanagement know the issue only too well. We are often having to fire fight, and most of us in the business will have seen times when we were so busy quelling the flames that we didn’t have time to stop them starting.
One of the things that I’m passionate about in any job I take on is giving myself time to be able to do things properly. Anticipation is really 90% experience allowing you to expect the unexpected. You also develop your own toolkit of things that allow you handle things quickly when the need arises to stop matters getting out of hand.
Being able to anticipate is also a product of reading the situation and spotting the possibility of a problem and preparing for it, taking remedial action. “Perfect planning prevents p**s poor performance” as one of my team used to put it, and that really summed it up for our team. Yes we had our fair share of panics in the early days, but we worked on them, thought about them, talked about them and would listen to any idea, no matter how daft it might have sounded at the time.
Over the first year we had got most of the seasonal issues better planned and, no matter how well our solutions worked we would always review them because sometimes they were too good and we could get the right results with less effort and/or cost. Sure there were times when we got it wrong as well (I used to tell them that if we were perfect we’d be running FM beyond the pearly gates), but getting it wrong teaches you far more that getting it right.
Having the drains up in a non threatening way I also covered recently. Building a team where people can speak frankly requires a tremendous trust in each other. It isn’t the easiest thing to achieve, and you can lose it in an instant if you’re not strong enough as a leader, but when you have it the team can, and will, fly. Team spirit is another major factor in being able to anticipate problems and head them off at the pass. The team will be watching each other’s backs and playing for the good of the team rather than for themselves.
I’ve used the FM environment here to illustrate the point, but it applies just as much across the whole business spectrum. A fired up and motivated team will have the bases covered and negate the violent swerves because they will see things coming. A business in this shape is not going to get caught up in the pendulum swings because they don’t need to. They can make and cope with the fine adjustments to strategy by deployment of the right tactics to achieve objectives.
The only circles you will find a team like this going round are of the Plan, Do and Review kind as they constantly improve their performance.
Use your environment to help the environment – the ultimate in recycling?
In Facilities Management (FM) we pride ourselves on our buildings and how we run them, and I think that we have been early adopters and champions of sustainable and environmental issues. But are we doing enough? In terms of what we can do in our own right we probably are close to it, but how much are we influencing the people that we look after?
Whether we are an in house or outsourced FM service provider we are unlikely to be able to bring about significant sustainable changes on our own, but there are ways that we can collaborate with others to influence and be influenced by them. The key to this is, to use the word in its original meaning, our environment.
Consider the environment in which the building(s) we manage and the people who use it live and work in: The local geographic environment. Do we talk to our commercial and residential neighbours on issues of common interest? How about the local authorities; do we have any dialogue with them? What about how people get to work? Some of these issues will fall into the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) remit, so are you talking to them about what FM can offer and finding out what they have on their agenda? There are a lot of opportunities.
Consider the business environment that the people in the building work in. What business are they in? What do they want to showcase? What is the image that they are trying to portray to the outside world? Do you talk to the PR and Marketing people (other than when they want a desk moved)? FM has a lot to offer; we manage a lot of the things that interface with the outside world that can affect image and people’s perception of the company.
Your building’s occupants have an outside life, and that is another of the environment that FM impacts on. We manage the place where these people work for about a third of their day. We recognise that impact in terms of job satisfaction and people retention, but do we acknowledge that it also has a powerful impact on people’s moods and they way that they will interact with family and friends when they are away from work?
The ripple effect of the things that we do in the building(s) we manage goes out into the world around us, but often we are too involved in managing the splash to see where the ripples go and their impact. If we take that analogy literally, we know that ripples on a pond will cause erosion in the banks, so what impact are our ripples having in our local and business environments?
There is the “I’ve got enough on my plate” argument, but I would counter that by suggesting that getting to grips with some of these issues can take away existing pressure points and give you more time to manage. If your occupants are more content then you’ll have less complaints and the same applies to neighbours. If you’re building good relations with various internal and external groups you’re raising the FM stock and gaining a fan club; neutrals are better than enemies and fans are better than neutrals.
Over the years I’ve run all sorts of schemes, some of which seemed very off the wall to begin with but all paid dividends. There’s not room to list them here, but feel free to ask. Talk to others and collaborate on mutually beneficial projects. Using your environment to help the sustainable and environmental agenda is something to consider: The ultimate in recycling?
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