Sourcing a Sourcing company - Part I

 

Nowadays more and more consulting firms are offering expert sourcing advice in the UK. All sizes of advisory company advertise in their websites how good their sourcing practices are and how they can satisfy their client’s needs. This is great news because it means that the business community has finally understood the value of sourcing advice and is demanding it!

This situation, although good for consulting businesses, has generated a new interesting question for all sourcing executives within companies; how do I source my “sourcing” advisor?

Although answering this question will require a much greater analysis, I would like to focus just onto two characteristics all consulting firms seem to share when it comes to sourcing: independence and objectivity. We could again spend some time debating about the meaning of these two concepts, but for the time being lets just agree that independent and objective advice is one that is not initially biased and is justified only by using existing and known facts. This is easy, but the real challenge is in the actual delivery of the service. Can all consulting firms provide an independent and objective advice? The answer to this question is just No.

As we all know, sourcing is a company-wide decision, which can affect any business area or function within a company. It can potentially involve all major decision-makers and stakeholders, making its implications sometimes difficult to assess. Given this potential wide scope, an independent and objective consulting firm giving sourcing advice must be very careful in not having its work biased or affected by any of its other line of services/businesses, which could potentially benefit from the sourcing outcome. For example, a sourcing consultant working for a company that also has a BPO business unit, will have to erect some “Chinese walls” between the consulting and the BPO area so its final outcome is not affected by the desire of the BPO unit of winning an additional service. Also, a consulting firm with a sourcing and HR advisory practises will also need to erect “Chinese Walls” in order to have its advice not interfered by the HR area looking to manage the transfer of hundreds of employees.

I could provide hundreds of more examples, but by this time you would have probably come to the same conclusion I did: given the nature and scope of sourcing advisory, and if independence and objectivity are mandatory, only a consulting firm with a sole focus on sourcing can deliver the value companies look for and expect when looking for sourcing advice. If this is understood, then the question of how to source a sourcing advisor becomes much more easier to answer.