To turn best practice into best value

To turn best practice into best value

While working on several concepts and customer offers at the same time, you will sometimes find interesting challenges on your way. One that comes up more often is the challenge of “valuating” Best Practices. Within our IT practice, we are more and more getting used to (and our company even focusses primarily on this form of delivery in SAP P2P) best practice solutioning. But being honest on most Best Practice suppliers: in reality it can mainly be described as “OFTEN” practiced, instead of “BEST” practiced per se! All of us like to sell our customers the impression, but the moment they start asking supporting data…

As I have written about more often, within our Business Consulting practice, we keep ourselves pretty busy with searching into the depths of Best Value Procurement at the moment. These activities result in various customer engagements, offering and advising at both ends of the BVP-table. This new way of tendering, following less strict quality directions, challenges suppliers to offer their best knowledge into solutions. But the only way you can convince your customers about the added value, is by supporting it with facts. Where a regular tender is traditionally invented by the customer and the supplier only has to claim and convince experience, a BVP tender only knows a certain goal and the supplier is the party to invent, explain and claim added value.

As a basic thought, the concepts of Best Value Procurement and Best Practice Delivery fit like gloves and go together like a handshake. Unfortunately in reality, it is hard to let these two really meet. It is not expected that the number of BVP tenders will completely overgrow the regular tenders, so for some of the less flexible IT suppliers, there is still some hope that they can stay in business with some part of the market cornered in the old way of storytelling. But for the rest of us out there, the niche players that feel the need to add value and stand out in the crowd, it gives some nice new thought about approaching the concept of Best Practice Delivery.

Lately, I am working with a software company who seemed to have really understood this dilemma: Organizations need solutions not only because they want them but because they have an issue and need an actually performing setup to counter them. This company sells software for business process modelling, that is often used as a delivery channel for best practice templates. But besides the solution push, there is a feature incorporated in the software, that helps you as a supplier to monitor the actual performance of your process. So designing it, automatically also gives you the tools in hands to monitor your success. And the beauty is: this allows you to actually change your ways, optimize your delivery impact by improving your solution. So this software (but of course most of all this line of thinking) allows you to go grow your product through all phases: 1. get a lot of experience, 2. design a nice commonly used solution, 3. sell it, 4. monitor closely, 5. Evolve it, and 6. sell it better again and again.

Most competitors stop at #3 but we want to stand out...

Doede van Haperen
www.lakran.com
www.postulit.com