Alliance Management

World-Class Alliance Management

World-Class Alliance Management is based on work Dr. Starling  started in the 1990s when Supply Chain Management was starting to emerge as a more prominent approach to developing competitive advantage.   Withing SCM there become competing ideas about how suppliers should be treated.  Many top managers felt the best way to manage suppliers was with arms length transactional relationships.  Others became advocates of working hand in hand with many suppliers in collaborative relationships that were taken to the next level as alliance relationships.   The best choice is a mix of the two with specific criteria to decide which suppliers should be maintained as transactional and which suppliers should be brought tighter in as alliance relationships.   Alliance relationships are of course not limited to suppliers.  Alliance relationships extend upstream to a company's customers.