Strategic Outsourcing Professionals

Within the Vendor Management discipline of a Global Operations organization, the process of a Quarterly Business Review (QBR) should be established to achieve high-quality performance and ensure a healthy, successful partnership with your vendor(s). While some people use the QBR as an excuse for a boondoggle (which isn’t always a bad thing), I feel that they are extremely valuable for managing your business; I wanted to share my viewpoints and guidelines for facilitating successful meetings and enriching partnerships.

The QBR process should be established immediately upon execution of a sourcing relationship. It acts as a forum for all parties to establish clear understanding of business goals, objectives, expectations and future direction for the business. This meeting should be viewed as an important tool to discuss and work through change activities for the benefit of performance improvement.

In my opinion, the QBR meeting should be setup in a similar fashion to what is outlined below:

• Established Agenda and Participants
• Develop Decks for Both Your Company and Vendor(s)
  • Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats (SWOT) Assessment
  • SLA Root Cause Analysis –Both Positive and Negative
  • Performance Improvement Planning
  • Project Updates/Proposals
  • System Enhancement(s)
• Corporate Initiatives
• Forward Planning and Strategy
• Appendix of Agreed to Performance Data
• Action Log for Meeting Follow-up(s)

When preparing for a QBR, I also suggest following these tips:

• Set the date for the meeting no later than five weeks in advance
• Set the agenda and participants in advance
• Share the decks prior to the meeting to ensure discussion points can draw actionable items by each company – remember, this is a collaborative process for the greater good.
• Do the QBR face-to-face (this can be challenging with cost center budgets)
  • Personally, I like to have vendor(s) visit us
• Document and share all actions and discussion points that evolved from the meeting
  Manage the actions to ensure improvement within the organization
  Enrich the relationship with some extracurricular activity

If you would like to read a similar article on managing a QBR, you can check out a site I like to frequent - 360VendorManagement. This author needs to remain anonymous, but he is a tenured professional and I respect his ideas and thoughts. Great minds think alike!