Listening to the Buy-Side

Today's blog on TPI's Americas Sourcing Leadership Exchange (SLE) comes from Peter Allen, Partner and Managing Director, TPI.

Falling quickly on the heels of our Americas Sourcing Industry Conference (SIC) held for service providers, we conducted our latest Americas Sourcing Leadership Exchange (SLE) for buy-side participants last week in Chicago.

What can one learn from spending a couple of days with almost 200 executives who are actively involved in the outsourcing business proposition and battling the recessionary markets of 2008?  Plenty.

Despite some of the popular conjecture about a slowdown in the adoption of outsourcing, this was our largest SLE ever, and the attendees generally expressed a desire to become ever MORE active in using outsourcing to achieve greater variability in their corporate cost profiles.

Many of the attendees, whether in the planning stages or actively managing existing arrangements, were keen on achieving even greater flexibility in their costs.  The discussions around captive operations, shared services and internal optimization received considerable air time when considered in contrast to outsourcing.

There was also a fair amount of buzz around two of our innovation agenda status reports. We reviewed the findings recently published on change management with a hearty discussion on the need to drive changes to client behaviors if outsourcing is to achieve its goals. 

Of equal prominence was the report from our innovation team (formerly called gainsharing) as we reviewed the three new introductions to our transaction methodology to ensure that the topic of innovation is appropriately addressed in the source selection process.

All in all, the few days were a fabulous and rare opportunity to bring together a group of practitioners that could learn from each other. The final keynote presentation and discussion by Ralph Szygenda, GM Group Vice President and Chief Information Officer, General Motors, was certainly thought-provoking. 
Our Asia SIC and SLE events are coming up soon!