To draft service levels and manage relationships well, you merely have to remember that they need to be SMART (as made popular by Peter Drucker): Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-Bound, blending the rationality and romanticism as we go. Recall from the first part of this series that we were discussing the “S” – Specific of Strategic Supplier Management (SSM). In this second of five-part series, we’re going to discuss the “M” – Measurable.
Measurable – While it might seem obvious, you must be able to measure your chosen metric. Counting alone isn’t necessarily enough. Rather, you might need to be able to track start/stop times/days (and then do the math to calculate the difference). If the calculation is manual, you also need people to keep track. This, perhaps, is the most problematic part of any service level management… as the folks who want the benefits of the service level (usually managers) are not the people watching the clock or experiencing the outages first-hand (the staff). So unless the staff has some sort of reason to monitor the metric accordingly, none of this is going to matter.
From a SSM perspective, NET(net) empowers its Managed Services with our On-Demand Contract Management System, Contract Compass™. This SaaS based contract management tool enables maximum leverage of your agreements along with supplier score-carding to monitor and track the deliverables and service levels promised in your agreements. NET(net) provides you with timely alert notifications, assistance in discussing developing issues and best practice policies and procedures to ensure that your agreements live up to your vision at the outset of the relationship.
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For more information on NET(net)’s Strategic Supplier Management services, visit Managed Services
