ENTERPRISE RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

Enterprise Relationship Management (ERM) – Making collaborative performance certain

Enterprise Relationship Management is a straight-forward but rigorously applied Target Operating Model containing all the management processes for co-ordinating the business activities that are essential to the success of a joint/multi-party endeavour. It involves the formal management of those aspects of a joint enterprise that contribute to bottom line success and is essential to fruitful collaboration.

Key to this are two elements:

• The first is the use of an Enterprise Relationship Management Plan (ERMP). It covers the whole of the joint enterprise and is used as the ‘dashboard’ that provides the ‘instruments’ and ‘controls’ to manage the relationship. Enhanced capabilities and appropriate behaviours will develop naturally.

• The second is an agreed set of joint performance criteria which will feed into management processes to ensure optimum relationship efficiency and value capture. These will cover the main drivers of innovation, investment, communication, operations and value and, will ensure that the partners focus on the same factors both within their own organisations and across the partnership. This encapsulated in the PartnerLink Service.

Without ERM collaborative management is unattainable; it is therefore a fundamental requirement.

It is described in the document linked below and the ‘how to do it’ is fully laid out in our book Implementing and Managing Collaborative Relationships.

ERM as an Enabler

• Enables the selection of the right partner (The Decision Phase) before committing to a long-term collaborative relationship thus avoiding costly mistakes

• Facilitates the setup of a new alliance’s relationship that allows the partners to successfully mesh

• Provides a single agreed vision for the enterprise with a single view of the operations and their performance allowing clear, unambiguous control so that the result will be greater than the sum of the parts

• Where a system of formal relationship management is not in use and an organisation is in a collaborative relationship which is either experiencing problems or wants to improve its performance ERM is implemented as part of a change programme that is initiated following performance measurement and diagnostics

• Empowers high performance relationship management supporting day-to-day operational processes, (The Operations Phase)

• Promotes teamwork that brings together the many parts of the joint enterprise into an efficient ‘machine’ for delivering high-quality goods, services, and projects

• Creates an environment in which innovation will thrive based upon trust, commitment, co-operation and quantified achievements

• Ensures the orderly wind-up of a collaborative relationship when it has reached the end of its life (The Exit Phase)

• All of this translates into increased bottom line/value for money performance, in other words, securing a positive return on collaboration

For more information see Enterprise Relationship Management: Making Collaborative Performance Certain