Partner choice You have interviewed an executive of a company that plans to outsource strategically important services.

What key insights can you get from the following excerpt of your interview about selecting IOR partners generally?

Normally we are using a tender process where we invite at least three or more potential partners who are acting in this arena. We explain to them what our objective is, what we want to see in terms of cost and development of processes, and in terms of quality. Then these invited service providers present their proposals. Then there are a couple of critical elements very relevant to us to come to a final decision. We talk about global outsourcing, but local coverage is of essence. So being able to provide, communicate and contact all of our organisations worldwide. So time zone issues, language, skill issues are important; one of the questions therefore is, whether the potential partner we want to work together with has global presence?
or is it more a regional player? The second factor would be the cost factor; so how does the cost compare with what we were able to do in-house? The third element would be quality and how to develop that moving forward. So what would be their expertise to enable and support us in improving these processes, simplifying these processes, and add more value to these processes? On the other side, can they help us in standardisation and harmonisation of the processes at various sites? Another element would be the track record of the company.

What is it that they can show us that they have done with other players in the area? These would be key critical points. We also would look at their IT infrastructure, trying to understand how their expertise with ERP systems match with what we are running? How are they connected to a backbone infrastructure so that communication from an IT perspective is working fine? So these are the four or five key KPIs that we would compare different service providers, one against the other.