What is your Underwear?! And other Sourcing related questions

Global Sourcing and Underwear? You must be wondering what the connection is and if by chance I have lost it and forgotten that I am supposed to write about sourcing, however cheeky it is!

Well, there is a connection and I do hope I haven’t lost it…here is a true story of what happened at a client’s technology workshop the day before. Without revealing the client’s identity or other confidential details, suffice it to say this is one of world’s best known brands. Let us call them company Brand X. So, Brand X has decided to embark on an Applications Outsourcing journey and have released an RFP recently (after going through an RFI stage and a customary India visit). They have short-listed 5 Global Sourcing Service Providers and my company happens to be one of them.

So far, so good. Now, they decided to do something highly unusual as part of the first set of interactions on the RFP – they invited all five providers for a detailed 4-day Technology Workshop during which they went through their high-level business and product strategy, technology roadmap and their entire applications portfolio. So, over the 4 days, in a room full of competitors, they picked different business areas and gradually drilled down into arcane details around tickets, support requirements, interfaces, coding languages, processes…you get the drift.

I say highly unusual, because in the 150+ outsourcing deals I have been exposed to, this is the FIRST time I have come across a client who is investing such time and effort at this stage of a deal to provide first hand information, make SMEs available, and address all questions service providers typically have at the RFP stage (most of them just make do with a written Q&A dialog, some call for either a bidders’ conference or one on one meetings that are usually less than half a day long, and very rarely does anyone get all vendors together for sessions that go beyond one day). This obviously shows the kind of commitment and seriousness Brand X is showing towards this Outsourcing initiative. It may not directly translate to a higher level of Sourcing Maturity: they are still talking about choosing a panel even for a relatively small piece of scope, doing things in waves, asking for a very simplistic pricing, etc.; but they will learn and all power to them!

To come back to the main topic, one of our esteemed competitors that also has an Indian pedigree, ran into the sort of situation during one of these Q&A sessions that can bring a campaign down! One of the presentations had just concluded by three women from Brand X and now they had thrown the floor open for questions. So, this guy from Competitor Y walks up to the mike in the front of the room (everyone was sitting at round tables, two for each service provider) and asks, “What is your Underwear?” Suddenly the entire room went into like an electric shock, and the three women managers froze with an incredulous look on their faces…had they heard correctly?! Sensing that he had clearly made a faux pas, the questioner tried to recover lamely and asked what he had really wanted to in the first place, “Sorry, I meant, what is your Middleware?” Some nervous laughter from the panel, a few titters from the back, a general sigh of relief around the room, and the moment passed. Or had it?

Without going into a Freudian analysis of the questioner’s state of mind or his background that could have led to this slip (pun, while unintended, fits perfectly), it doesn’t take long to conclude that Competitor Y will have some serious image and hence credibility issues to overcome going forward in this RFP process.

Going against a strong internal urge to now close this post with a list of like 5 or 7 key principles to keep in mind while going into these sessions and to seize the day, I will just offer up some final observations:

Sessions like this are a double-edged sword for the Service Providers. With the right team in place, asking some smart questions, and getting the right answers, it can help in the solutioning exercise and may also differentiate the provider from the get-go. On the other hand, risks abound too: your questions or team composition can tip the competitors, someone in the team can make some stupid mistakes (like above) or could come across in a way that brands the company negatively. And the client may now expect you to know everything to work out the final solutions, when in reality the information processing could take too long, the right team members may not be around to digest it, or the right kind of data may still need to be unearthed. In one of my future posts, I do plan to touch upon the right and wrong kind of questions and styles that providers need to keep an ear out for during these sessions.

Before i close, a piece of serious advice to the guy from Competitor Y - Get a Life! And, thanks for making life easier for us.