Collaboration: Leveraging Business Partners in the Inside and Outside

Collaboration is defined as working with partners with the common purpose of securing benefits for the business. Faced with increasing product complexity, an expanding global supplier landscape, and the ever-rising need for alignment, managing collaboration with internal and external business partners has always been at the heart of procurement. It helps to identify internally which value dimensions (i.e., savings, innovation, quality, sustainability, speed, and risk) are most important to other functions such as R&D or production, and it helps to appropriately reflect those requirements externally when interacting with suppliers. Yet, these collaborations are often not handled optimally—without the right focus on business partners or the optimal ways of approaching them.