The Challenges of Outsourcing Part Four: Supplier selection (top tips 6-10)

In this post, Lorraine Ellery Matthews continues to share feedback from leading scholarly publishing professionals focusing on practical advice and further top tips (Tips 6-10) to consider when selecting a supplier to outsource your product or service.

The first post in the series identified 10 key drivers to outsource and the second post outlined Stakeholder Engagement.

Part three identified five top tips for selecting a supplier

1. What impressions do you have of a supplier?
2. Ensure effective communication
3. Forge positive relationships
4. Engage in early collaboration
5. Look under the hood

In this post, she outlines top tips 6-10:

6. Consider time and resources

"When moving suppliers you need to have built in sufficient post-implementation time to ensure that the quality of the core service is at least as good as it was before the change. The call on time and resources and the resultant loss of momentum should not be underestimated - you want to be able to reassure your customers, and ideally involve them in the ‘live’ test phase." Daniel Smith, semi-retired Publisher and Consultant, previously Head of Academic Publishing at The IET

7. Obtain recommendations and feedback

Requesting references from a supplier should be a given and once received, ensure you ask for feedback from different roles within the organization that deal with the supplier, including those that deal with the day to day communications. Ensure you ask the supplier’s customers how their transition went and their current experience.

Obtaining recommendations from a trusted source of your own can also provide you with a more in-depth insight than relying on those references supplied alone.

In conversation with Simon Laurenson, Operations Manager at Bioscientifica about the switch to a new eCommerce supplier, Simon shared some helpful advice:
"It's important to speak to other publishers and get as much advice as you can, with lots of society owned publishers our size we have the opportunity to exchange notes." 

A word of caution, however. When talking to another publisher/organization you need to consider that at the time of talking with others, they may have been optimistic so it's best if you do not rely on this feedback alone.

All the publishers I spoke to will provide clear feedback if asked by the suppliers once the RFP/Tender process has ended, recognizing the time and effort invested by the supplier and to aid continued improvement. At the end of the selection process do also ask suppliers for feedback from their perspective too. For example: How did your RFP compare to others they have seen and what other questions could have been asked?

8. Expect the unexpected 

Even with good planning, it's hard to know exactly what to expect back from a supplier.

Ove Kähler, Director Product Management & Global Distribution at Brill speaks about proposals he received back from suppliers:

"We didn't expect to get responses back that were close to 150 pages long. Also, the diversity of proposals and different aspects of pricing made it difficult to compare them. We tried to prevent this by providing vendors with the Excel version of our requirements. Even though they filled in the sheet and highlighted what was in scope and what wasn’t, it was still a challenge to get a good easy overview of how the proposals compared."

9. Quality assessment

In discussion with Jeremy MacDonald, Director of Technology at Pharmaceutical Press, quality assessment was raised as a key undertaking when developing an APP and he emphasised the importance of selecting a supplier that can get the data right first time:

"There are multiple internal challenges that arise when trying to present data that needs to be clinically correct. People are using this data to make important decisions about other people including children so there is a high level of responsibility for you as the publisher to get it right. When developing an APP, you are having to create your content set in different media so have to ensure quality assessment has been undertaken before presenting the data.

Getting an App to work across different platforms is a challenge with the different versioning of devices e.g. IOS 5 and IOS 10 - things evolve forward and therefore you need to ensure the App can continue to work with different devices and platforms. Upgrades are open to error and we have to continually test and modify the code base."

Testing partners
It's not always possible to test different versions of iPhone for example within your organization. Therefore, the publisher found test partners who were able to undertake the testing for them. Everyone in-house at the publisher runs Windows 7, therefore a SaaS partner was also needed to test their browsers and Apps on different desktops.

10. Planning

Finally, if things do NOT work out it can be really painful so it is important to ensure you have agreed on a project plan with you supplier that is prepared for every contingency. A good project plan will allow you to monitor the stages of a project development, make adjustments where necessary and maintain a momentum with your supplier through to implementation and beyond.

Daniel Smith, in discussing hosting services noted "A properly formulated project plan would allow at least 6-12 months of post-implementation activity to ensure that the service is fit for purpose and where it is not, there is time and resource to put it right."

It is important to be realistic with your timelines. If you have to change supplier at short notice, you need to be accommodating in terms of what you expect of the new supplier. If you are pushing a tight deadline on them, you need to be aware this may cause longer term problems.

Effective communication and forging good relationships will go a long way to ensuring a successful project and outsource partnership. However, to avoid frustration, don't forget also to plan for the expected as one publisher suggested: "Everything can stop for Christmas!".

Do you have any further tips or thoughts on this topic that you would like to share?

Join Lorraine Ellery Matthews who will be chairing the Outsourcing Challenges workshop at the forthcoming Research to Reader Conference in London on 20 and 21 February 2017.  The workshop poses the following question to the wider community:

Which aspects of the scholarly communications process can be outsourced, how can risks be mitigated and how can outsourcing be most effectively managed?

Register here for the 2017 Research to Reader Conference.

The Challenges of Outsourcing Part Three: Supplier selection (top tips 1-5)

In this post, part three of the Challenges of Outsourcing, Lorraine Ellery continues to share feedback from leading scholarly publishing professionals focusing on practical advice and tips to consider when selecting a supplier to outsource your product or service.

This follows the first post in the series identifying 10 key drivers to outsource and the second post outlining Stakeholder Engagement.

1. What impressions do you have of a supplier?

You may have already undertaken an early RFI (request for information) from a supplier, carried out your own research or commissioned a competitor analysis of the supplier landscape. However, to really get a good impression of the supplier, you need to consider how they are positioned and what they can bring to your business. You may find you need to engage in a more formal RFP (request for proposal) or tender process.

The RFP/Tender process should provide a framework that allows you to obtain a clear impression of the supplier; the product and service offering they provide; how they will address and meet your requirements and a clear indication of how they stand out from their competitors. The following key questions need to be answered before reaching an outsourcing agreement with a supplier:

• Can they understand my business? 
• Can they meet my requirements? 
• Can they offer service reliability? 
• Customer service, can they carry through on their promises?
• Budget and ongoing costs, are these visible and agreeable? 
• Have we agreed on critical value objectives? 
• What is their value proposition, is this measurable?
• What is their track record in servicing similar organizations?
• How will their location affect me and my organization? (onshore or offshore) 
• Do they have the ability to communicate effectively? 
• Will I have Insight into their product/service roadmap? 
• Are there signs of instability? 
• Will our external auditors accept them?

If you are happy with your current supplier then you may not wish to spend time in going out to tender (unless you are obliged to do so) or in progressing with a formal RFP process. It is, therefore, advisable to first consider the opportunity cost involved!

2. Ensure effective communication

It is very important to mitigate against misunderstanding and incorrect interpretation usually caused by poor communication.

I asked "is stakeholder engagement key to effective communication?" in my last post and wish to add that it is advisable to ensure you have agreed a clear project scope and selection criteria with relevant stakeholders before you reach out to suppliers. Whether this is before embarking on an informal or formal tender process, the preparation will take time, but this investment will ensure your objectives, goals and requirements are clear, assist you in managing expectations, provide a frame of reference and help take the emotion out of the supplier selection decision.

Clear expectations
Caroline Burley, Journals Operations Manager, Publishing Services & Production at the Royal Society of Chemistry shares her thoughts:

"Suppliers may say “yes we can do that” straight away without taking the time to fully understand what we are asking them to do. To ensure the supplier fully appreciates our requirements we try to make the documentation we provide as clear as possible and work through examples with them, providing feedback so that they can understand exactly what we are asking for.

If everyone is clear on the expectations and in agreement, then you should be able to work with the supplier to agree a realistic timeline to deliver the service. If they are not clear on what you are asking them to do, they may have to do additional last minute work that they were not anticipating which may affect the delivery time. Or if, as the customer, you are pushing for a fast delivery, it may be the case that they can't do all of the preparatory work before you go live.

You may need to be accommodating in terms of what you expect of the new supplier if you have a tight deadline, but be aware this may cause longer term problems once the motivation to finish the preparative work is removed.”

Agree to a SOW (statement of work)
The Head of the Journal program for a large medical society which completed several transitions to new vendors in 2016 recommends:

"Publishers and the selected vendor should agree in a SOW (and in great detail) what will be delivered and when with compensation or penalties for non-delivery. This is especially important for key workflow processes and functionalities.

Ideally, the consultant and client staff should document or record meetings with vendors during the RFP process and make sure that all parties are in agreement on what was presented and discussed to minimize disagreements and differences in interpretation at agreement and transition stage."

3. Forge positive relationships

"There is a lot to say for a relationship that is a positive one, and where you and the supplier are clear about your expectations both ways. Not just in a contract or agreement, but in terms of the actual interaction with the people you are working with. As the sales cliché suggests 'people buy from people first', there will be relationships that are particular to the organization and not every publisher is looking for the same thing." Director of Publishing, leading UK society publisher

4. Engage in early collaboration

Collaborating with consultants:
Collaborate with consultants to help distill information and facilitate discussion to allow stakeholders to talk through their frustrations - this feedback can strengthen the value of the final offering.

A consultant can ensure you select and retain the partners that best fit your organizational goals, provide advice and manage all or specific components of the RFP/Tender process, including the following:

• Early research e.g. Competitor analysis 
• Project management and advice
• Support and assist in management of the selection process including creation of the RFP/tender documentation; evaluation of responses received, selection and brokering of agreements
• Create and manage the implementation of contracts and SLA’s 

Matthew Cianfarani, Director International Business Development, Mark Allen Group collaborated with a consultant when outsourcing their hosting platform. Matthew suggests
"Use a consultant early to shape the whole thing – if you don’t have a large IT team who understand academic publishing you need an outside view of what you do, to communicate to potential vendors."

Early involvement of technical experts  
Sometimes you will find that you are dealing mainly with the commercial staff at the supplier end and it is not until an agreement is signed that the hand over to technical experts begins.

"Involvement of a technical person earlier in discussion provides continuity." Helen King, Digital Strategy Lead at BMJ

4) Look under the hood

Before buying a car, you would look under the hood, before buying a new outfit you would preferably try it on. Therefore, why not apply this common sense when outsourcing?

It can take commitment of both time and finance to try a service before you buy, however, it can certainly be worth the investment as Helen King, BMJ found: "Working with a potential supplier to test their services before you decide to move platform can provide you with a large amount of qualitative information about the service and if it will be a good fit."

Sign up using your email to receive blog posts in this series, post four will highlight a further 6-10 tops tips to consider.

Lorraine will be chairing the Outsourcing Challenges workshop at the forthcoming Research to Reader Conference in London on 20-21 February 2017: Which aspects of the scholarly communications process can be outsourced, how can risks be mitigated and how can outsourcing be most effectively managed?

Register here for the 2017 Research to Reader Conference

The Challenges of Outsourcing Part Two: Stakeholder Engagement

In this post, part two of the Challenges of Outsourcing series, Lorraine Ellery Matthews continues to share feedback from leading scholarly publishing professionals. In her interviews she has asked about the involvement and engagement of stakeholders in the decision making process of outsourcing, what was planned and what was unexpected!

This follows the first post outlining the 10 key drivers to outsource.

Formalizing the process

One organization were lucky enough to have a specialist, qualified procurement team in place reporting to the Director of Operations. The team are responsible for all contracts with a value through its lifetime of £150,000 and over, this includes everything in terms of production work including the typesetting and printing.

However, engagement of outsourcing as a service hadn't always been managed in this way and started with just one person, albeit someone who came to the organization with a high level of industry experience working with both off-shore and on-shore suppliers. Fast forward several years and now with contracts for all suppliers and best practise from start to end in place the organization has certainly seen the benefit of having the process formalized, even if there are occasions when they have been challenged internally regarding the costs involved!

Should it be left to one team to reach decisions?

Many organizations will not have the benefit of a dedicated procurement team and instead will utilize the members of the relevant department or create a temporary cross departmental project team to manage the process. Decision making is varied, and much is dependent on the complexity of the required outsource service. Some teams had the relevant skills and resource to reach a decision without having to reach out to others in their organization. Other's had clear policies in place to ensure the decision is overseen and agreed by a committee or management team or both.

Although the final decisions maybe undertaken by a small group the input from start to finish was in most cases (although not always) widely sought.

Is stakeholder engagement key to effective communication?

Accountability is of course important as despite good intentions and best laid plans put in place to ensure that a partnership is successful (supplier relations will be discussed in my next post) there is always a risks that things don't go to plan. It is therefore important to ensure that internal stakeholders outside your team are approached early and invited to input their thoughts and provide feedback as these individuals are then more likely to support your decisions in moving forward (partners in crime). Obtaining buy-in from others will allow you not only to share the projects success but also accountability in the event of any problems down the line, reducing the risk of receiving "if only you had asked me first" comments when it is far too late.

Facilitating discussions to allow stakeholders to talk through their frustrations can strengthen the value of the final offering.

The feedback that derives from engagement also helps when considering if you have taken all the risks into account and to stop and ask if you are making the right decisions.

One platform manger took a unique and possibly risky approach when it came to external engagement which worked in his favour:

"My biggest success was not to have found the right platform vendor but to get the management board on side."

The manager was approached by a scholarly publishing organization committee looking for a keynote speaker for a conference with a theme based around "how to manage different content types". The manager had a solution, a vision for their own organization that had continued to develop into a wider vision in parallel with their request for proposal (RFP) process that was underway at the time.

The keynote presentation took place before the developing vision had been fully approved internally. The manager received positive comments and support for his vision from the industry delegates attending and these comments also directly reached the organization's management team. This approach may have been risky but one that was not regretted as subsequently the internal buy-in was significantly supported by the external buy-in generated by the industry delegates present.

To engage or not with customers?

The interviewees were asked about the level of engagement with their communities and customers during the outsourcing process. The response was mixed and some key factors for consideration emerged:

1. Whether people feel attached to the system or not!

The quality of feedback is more likely if people feel an attachment to the system. Attachment is less likely for production systems than it is for say peer review or hosting solutions.

For example, editorial board members may have to interact with the system on a regular basis, acting as academic editors as well as overseeing the peer review process. The authors and reviewers will have a lot of experience using various systems too, especially given that there are only a handful of major suppliers in the market.

The same is true with hosting platforms, even though people may not realize they are experiencing them they often have strong views about how they see things and how things are presented online.

2. Concerns over alerting customers to change

Some expressed that although they engage with their customers throughout the year they would not necessarily inform them before the decision to change suppliers was made and in some instances not until after implementation. They felt that through ongoing continuous engagement they will already have built up a good picture over time of the customers requirements and do not see the need to alert them and risk the cause for unnecessary concern.

3. Is the supplier set up to engage with the customer?

The customer is a critical partner and large publishers are likely to have user groups, focus groups and advisory boards in place to support ongoing engagement with customers throughout the year. However, a smaller publisher may not yet have these forums in place and therefore, as one interviewee recounted, was able to benefit from the supplier's ability to engage their customers directly to provide feedback on their system.

4. Engage only with a select group of customers

To ensure quality feedback you may decide to take the middle ground and obtain feedback from a select group of customers that you know you can rely on. As one publisher interview stated "if you are brave in the process you may also want to invite one or two customers in the testing of the system."

Supplier engagement

A key aim when considering outsourcing or moving to a new supplier is to establish a long term partnership.

Forge relationships early so that when you are looking to outsource or move supplier you already have trusted relationships in place.

• Suppliers may develop new technologies, or form strategic partnerships to provide an improved or new solution for their service that you may benefit from, therefore, it is advisable to keep abreast with their developments.
• Understand the competitor landscape and what options are available to you, even from those outside of your own industry.
• Communication is much improved if you match relationships at various levels within both the supplier and your own organization.
• Feedback will help the supplier develop their solution further and is important at all stages of engagement, including following an RFP whether the supplier is selected as your partner or not.

Sign up using your email to receive blog posts in this series, the next will be focusing on The RFP Process & Supplier Evaluation.

Lorraine Ellery Matthews will be presenting The Challenges of Outsourcing sharing further recommendations from leading publishing professionals on Wednesday 7 December at 2.15 p.m. on Stage 1 at the London Info International exhibition. Attend and join in the discussion – booking available here. Exhibition visitors can register for free.

The Challenges of Outsourcing Part One: 10 Key Drivers to Outsource

An organization outsources many different services and processes to experts and those who offer specialist tools and systems to support their requirements. In the first of a series of guest posts, Lorraine Ellery Matthews outlines what the key challenges are when thinking about outsourcing. In this post, she considers what the key drivers are for a company that can lead to outsourcing. These articles are based on interviews conducted with experienced scholarly publishing professionals in 2016.

1. Strategic

Ask yourself, are you are a technology company or are you a publisher, library, etc? Do you want to be both or do you want to be one; what’s the balance, what’s the return on investment?

The key reasons for outsourcing for the first time can be a strategic one, based around where you wish to continue to invest your time and money and if you already have - or not - the necessary resource and in-house expertise to provide a quality service to your internal and external stakeholders.

You may still decide that there are strong competitive advantages to developing your own custom solution, however, in weighing up the pros and cons you may decide that it makes sense for your organization to focus your time and effort on your core business and therefore will seek a trusted partner that you expect to deliver a cost-effective quality, scale-able and timely service.

2. New technologies

The potential that changes in technology can provide will prompt a review into previous decisions. You may need to re-work you platform, re-work your strategy, remain flexible and re-invest.
APIs and open technologies create new opportunities: it is no longer necessary to host all your content on one platform as independent silos and systems can be integrated and meaningful content relationships created.

However, as one commercial publisher I spoke to who undertook a supplier review when their current hosting agreement was up for renewal, found that if you have already invested heavily and you are happy with your current supplier then despite the advantages that new technology may bring the potential up-front cost of decoupling your content and migrating to a new platform, particularly if you have specialist content hosted in a monolithic system may act as a major barrier to change.

3. New entrants

When you have already settled on outsourcing a services you may find that players in the space change over time, new entrants come into the market or there are other approaches to now consider, this can lead to the need to review that space and the cost of moving suppliers.

4. How much time and resource do you have available?

Consider whether you have enough experts in the organization to cover everything at once. Sometimes it is not just a cost based issue, but how much change you can manage, in how many places, and how many resources you have internally from an expertise perspective. The lack of availability of resource is a key driver when reaching a conclusion to outsource, particularly if you are heavily involved in a large in-house platform project.

5. Forced to move

The verdict to review and select a new supplier can sometimes be forced upon an organization, for example, through mergers and acquisitions. The time constraints associated to implementing changes in policy or the undertaking of an acquisition can provide huge challenges. The planning normally invested in the process of outsourcing is dictated by the situation rather than by you and more often than not will come at a time when not all stakeholders are available to provide their input into the strategic and tactical decisions that need to be agreed before deciding to enter into the process of evaluating and selecting a new partner.

6. Stability of your supplier

If there are signs that a supplier is becoming unstable, it is good business practice to undertake due diligence to ensure you are informed about the issues concerned and are fully aware of the options available to you if in the event you need to re-negotiate or exit your contract.

7. Breakdown of relationship

You may decide to review your options if you increasingly find that your supplier is no longer in tune with your business goals, are unable to communicate effectively, unwilling to consider your requests or are not delivering the agreed service level. The supplier may no longer offer an appropriate value proposition, may make promises they do not keep, or are not developing their service offering to keep up with market developments and requirements and standards. A combination of or even just one of these scenarios will be challenging and may even lead to a breakdown of relationship that is not always recoverable.

8. Company policy and/or best practice

You may have been with your current supplier for a number of years and would like to ensure you are aware of what the competitors offer so that you can be confident that you continue to receive value for money. Many organizations will have a company policy in place to ensure there is a constant review of all suppliers and the services they provide. This may happen every year or every two to five years depending on the complexity of the service and the organization’s internal policy.

9. Ensuring you are offering a good service to your customers

Many decisions are usually motivated by the desire to ensure you are offering a good service to your customers. In one example, a publisher was tasked with looking at their publishing set up, the systems and processes they were using currently, and over time, with the main objective to consider how these could be more efficient and how the organization could offer a better service for their authors and reviewers. Once their board approved the recommendations, they reached an agreement to look at their peer review systems, production systems and other related services.

10. Adopting a hybrid approach

You may decide to continue holding onto the reigns and not to outsource, but to develop your services in-house. You may also decide to in-source additional skills and technology components by partnering with specialists in their field. Rather than outsourcing this allows you to develop a hybrid solution and to share the cost of ongoing development for your service offering with your chosen partner.


Lorraine Ellery Matthews is the Proprietor for Ellery Matthews Consulting. She is writing a series of posts on The Challenges of Outsourcing on the ALPSP blog; the next will focus on The Process of Outsourcing. Sign up using RSS or email above. You can also read them on the Ellery Matthews Consulting blog.

Lorraine will present on The Challenges of Outsourcing sharing further recommendations from leading publishing professionals on Wednesday 7 December at 2.15 p.m. on Stage 1 at the London Info International exhibition. Attend and join in the discussion – book your place here. Exhibition visitors can register for free.

David Birkett reflects on outsourcing print journals production

David Birkett: does not read when cycling

Outsourcing is an issue that many learned societies grapple with. When we surveyed members earlier this year, well over three quarters of respondents said they outsource certain areas of their operation with the most common areas being production, technical and distribution.

What are the factors that drive the decision to outsource and what should you bear in mind when it comes to journals production? Here, in a guest post, David Birkett from Printondemand-worldwide reflects on the business reasons that drive this and suggests a way forward for print.

"For several consecutive years there appears to have been an increasing move away from in-house production to outsourcing. There are good reasons for this. Learned societies may not regard publishing as a core activity: it may simply be one among a range of services they provide for their members, often via a very small publishing team whose main role is to commission, arrange for peer review and edit journals articles. Larger publishers may also have reached the conclusion that outsourced production makes more sense: it ties up fewer staff, allows economies of scale that can’t be achieved by a single company, and enables them to take advantage of the outsourced partner’s expertise. Some publishers argue that with the advent of digital printing, production has become a ‘commodity’ activity and is therefore better outsourced, freeing up the in-house publishing team to devote its time to less tangible ‘value-adds’.

While publishers have long made arrangements with traditional printers either to hold spare journal print stock on their behalf, or to supply them with extra copies to store against future demand, this is a costly and potentially wasteful process.  It involves tying up cash long before such spare copies are sold (if indeed they ever are) and means committing further funds to storage.  An even worse problem than being stuck with stock that never sells out occurs when a request for a print journal is received after stocks are exhausted.

It is true that most publishers now offer their journals in digital format and are encouraging their customers to move away from print; and a minority of journals are now ‘born digital’.  However, even in the developed world some faculty members still demand that libraries hold journals in print format; and in parts of the developing world digital access is not always possible.  Journals that are supplied as part of membership benefits are usually distributed in print; and new members often request back copies.  Paradoxically, now that journals publication entails working with the ‘mixed economy’ of print and digital, the print part of the equation has become more difficult to manage, because it is harder to predict how many print copies will be required.

This is where digital printing comes into its own.  By working in partnership with a digital printer, it is possible for a publisher to print journals on a copy-by-copy basis as they are ordered.  The process is steady-state: once the files are placed with the printer, as many copies as required can be supplied and delivered to the end-customer three months, three years or a decade after the original publication date.  No money is tied up in stock or storage costs.  There’s no risk and no downside: just positive benefits.

As with all changes and challenges inspired by technological development, new solutions are emerging to tackle these issues.  Printondemand-worldwide, for example, has developed Journal Vault, a web-based system which - drawing on that company’s two decades of experience in digital printing, storage and distribution - allows journals publishers and learned societies to digitally store, print and distribute their journals and to handle their subscriber functions. It will be interesting to see how this and other solutions are embraced, and how they will develop, in partnership with journal producers, to a rapidly-changing environment."

David Birkett has run the gamut of book-trade jobs.  Beginning as a bookseller, he progressed to bookshop management, sales representation and sales and marketing management roles to his present position as Business Development Manager at Printondemand-worldwide, where he is enjoying using the knowledge and contacts he has gained to communicate with new and existing customers.  David’s chief passions are reading and cycling, although he seldom indulges them simultaneously.

Does ‘Yes’ really mean Yes?

Laxmi Chaudhry is co-tutor of ALPSP's new Outsourcing training course. She took part in our London Book Fair panel yesterday and spoke at last year's Outsourcing seminar. Here, she reflects on some of the key cultural issues that influence vendor relationships in a guest post.

Why is yes such a powerful word  when working with International Suppliers?

'In our globalised and outsourced/off shored world we are now working across different cultures and communication styles. This has given rise to a number of cultural challenges, further exacerbated by working remotely across distance and time zones. So what we may take for granted in terms of working style and communication in the UK, for example, can be very different in other cultures, giving rise to misunderstandings, time delays and poor business relationships. This of course impacts the bottom line!
  
The short but very powerful word “yes” encapsulates and reflects cultural differences and is one of the biggest sources of frustration and loss of trust. How is this so?

In the UK, “yes” generally means that we agree or accept and are committed to performing the necessary actions in achieving a desired result. If we are not able to do so or have difficulty in understanding the instruction, we usually ask further questions to gain clearer understanding or else we may speak up later if we come across difficulty.

However, in many cultures, such as in India and China, the word “yes” encompasses multitude of meanings besides the one we generally understand. Hence the room for giving rise to a host of difficulties when dealing with international suppliers, not least getting projects completed in time, instructions not being followed, not checking for clarification until the deadline date, and at times poorly executed work. Other examples of potential problem are ongoing business relationships suffering, opaque communication, and a culture of blame developing.  

What does ‘Yes’ mean in some cultures?

For example when a supplier in India says “yes” to a request or instruction from you, what it could really mean is any of the following:

• I am hearing you
• I hear you but I don’t understand you and won’t admit it
• I acknowledge I have received your request
• I recognise your status
• I am being polite
• I will do it if nothing else happens that’s more important
• I will deliver something but...

This list is by no means exhaustive. These differences in connotations and the understanding of the word “yes” arise due to differing underlying cultural values such as the importance of hierarchy, relationships, harmony etc.

However, it is very possible as a company to bridge the cultural and communication gaps and there are many examples of companies doing so thorough proactive cultural awareness training. This applies for both parties being involved and buying into this. One can get to a real understanding of what “yes” means in an outsourcing scenario and achieve effective working and relationships.'

Laxmi Chaudhry is a cross cultural consultant and trainer, specialising in business effectiveness across international cultures, working with global organisations in many sectors including publishing. She has spoken at ALPSP events on Outsourcing and is co-tutor of the Managing Quality from Outsourced Services training course in July 2014. You can contact Laxmi at laxmi@1stophr.com or www.1stophr.com.

Outsourcing: the good, the bad and the ugly. Staying in touch with your suppliers and understanding cultural differences.

Chris McKeown from Aptara

Chris McKeown, European Director Account Management for Aptara outlined the ingredients for a good customer/supplier relationship at ALPSP's Outsourcing seminar today.

The customer must be clear on what the supplier can deliver and any limitations on what the supplier can deliver. They need to avoid the 'yes' pitfall by being clear a supplier won't lose work or damage your perception of them by saying no to something. You have to feel comfortable that the supplier has a clear understanding of the partnership and they know the services the vendor can offer.

The supplier must be clear on the specification for the work and service level agreements (including times and quality measurements). They should understand what feedback and reporting is required as well as what the customer publishes and how the customer likes to work - communication is at the heart of this part of the relationship. Key performance indicators will be based upon communication, service and quality.

McKeown provided a range of tips. Think about public holidays in the country where your supplier is based. Ask the vendor to write up notes/actions to ensure they understand what has been agreed. Also have an escalation list of who to speak to if something does go wrong. Be aware of how an increased  inflow of work can have an impact on quality. Regular vendor reporting and regular calls are a great way to avoid problems.

Laxmi Chaudhry

Laxmi Chaudhry is a Director of 1 Stop HR and a cross-cultural trainer and consultant. She closed the seminar with an engaging overview of communication as the glue for outsourcing. There are several misconceptions people hold about cross-cultural communication.

Do you believe English is a common language? Think again. Jargon, phrases, irony, inference can all be lost in translation. Ask for clarification and confirmation, repeat, put in an email to reconfirm, and don't worry about patronising. That only comes from a tone of voice, not checking what has been understood.

Why does cultural awareness matter? It is about effective communication, language, successful teams and relationships between partners. Motivation and recognition drives higher performance and better collaboration. It also helps you to reflect your market place. It is an effective way of remote working and can impact on your bottom line.

Laxmi suggest that cultures are like icebergs: with explicit/overt observable behaviours above and implicit or covert beliefs, values and assumptions below, which are not easily observable. The key is to understand that what lies beneath is hugely influential on what goes on above. She urged delegates to consider cultural values and how they impact everyday business. Consider the differences in culture on the importance of hierarchy, relationships, context, direct or indirect approaches, how important the group is compared to the individual and the value of losing or keeping face. When you take these areas into consideration, it makes a lot of sense of how people respond.

Other advice included: don't underestimate the importance of non-verbal communication. Check for understanding - don't assume anything. If you are managing important overseas relationships, take steps to work more effectively with partners and have cultural awareness training.

Outsourcing: the good, the bad and the ugly. Selecting suppliers, sales and marketing.

Helen Whitehorn

Helen Whitehorn is Director of Path Projects Ltd and advises organizations on resolving a variety of operational and strategic challenges. She outlined the following five stage framework for selecting suppliers:

1. initiation
2. discovery
3. design
4. deliver
5. sustain

Start with a high level proposal and really think about why you are outsourcing. Which processes, departments and people should be involved? Are there key timings, such as product launches to be considered? When you produce the high level stratregic document. You begin to understand whether you know your workflow and what you require.

After developing your high level proposal, you should move on to a detailed specification and preferred suppliers, get an agreement in place and outline suppliers selected, detail the delivery of work underway, and outline monitoring, control and ongoing improvement.

Lorraine Ellery

Lorraine Ellery is a sales and marketing professional with experience in the information industry. She provided an overview of what to consider when outsourcing sales and marketing. Which services do you want to outsource? If it is market research, are you interested in quantitative, qualitative, industry, market or competitor research? Do you want telemarketing, web, PR and media, social media including SEO/SEM or mailings. With sales, are you interested in direct sales representatives, trade fair representation, telesales or sales support? You can also commission consultancy on strategy, outsourcing, mergers and acquisitions or strategic alliances.

Ellery outlined suggestions for best practice. These include managing expectations and ensuring you have a mutual agreement. A service level agreement is essential and it should be a professional agreement. The vendor should include a comprehensive sales and marketing plan so everyone is clear about what you want to achieve and what is to be undertaken.

It is very important from a sales agent's point of view that they have clear market feedback. This can be provided in various forms, from discussion with sales rep on the ground to monthly and pipeline reporting, that all good sales agents should provide you with. A timely response to any publisher enquiries is essential for building confidence in progress and reporting. She also suggests that you ask for references and percentages where they have been successful.

What does a sales agent expect from a publisher? An indication of budget really early on as it makes a big difference to proposal they make so it is appropriate. Marketing collateral and product information needs to be of good quality. If it doesn't meet the niche market needs, that can be part of the service that can be provided.

Share competitor information that you can that will help with the agreement. Pricing guidelines are key and include detail on pricing for different markets. The agent will be able to help with this. One model for one territory does not always translate well to another.

Consider conflicts of interest around allocation of resources, whether it is complementing or competing, and around internal communication - make sure work is agreed across the organization. Consider the compensation model. Some models are based on the value of sales, some on economies of sale,  others on commission-only models. Ellery cautioned that the latter holds more risk to the agent as it cuts off time to deliver and the lengthy sales process is not always conducive to reward (sales can come in direct to the publisher or via another sales agent). She advises a combination of fee based service with some kind of compensation model.

Ellery has tended to use formal contracts for services, but it can be as simple as an agreement to accept a proposal. The 3 Cs to bear in mind with a contract are commitment, clarity and communication.

Outsourcing: the good, the bad and the ugly. Edward Wates reflects on the Wiley-Blackwell experience.

Edward Wates, Wiley-Blackwell

Edward Wates is Global Journal Content Director for Wiley-Blackwell. He reflected on the Wiley-Blackwell experience at the ALPSP seminar on Outsourcing, providing insights into what to consider when outsourcing and insourcing, as well as lessons he has learnt.

The wider context for outsourcing is the changing environment. We are in a period of rapid change. There is a reduction in growth, digital transformation of business, with growth in open access that means lower revenue per article. There is restructuring and reinvestment in growth and innovation. Wates believes that you need to invest in article enrichment - they want their content to do more, and they want to use it in a more interesting way.

He noted that journal contract renewals is a competitive matter, often associated with improved royalty payments to keep the business. This will be the case for all publishers. All this has an impact on the cost base, so they have a responsibility to think about this.

What can be outsourced? You have to be careful about what you do and balance what you outsource and insource. This starts with redefining core competencies. They insource content acquisition, editorial judgement, sales reach, and purchasing/specification. They outsource: technology development, 'processing activities', customer services, marketing collateral and support.

You should use a range of financial metrics including cost of sale (typesetting, PP&B), plant costs (copy editing, project management), direct expenses (overheads), and releasing funds for investment. Production insourcing at Wiley-Blackwell has an ethos of 'manage more, do less'. They focus on workflow development, specification, purchasing, training and support, relationship management and project management.

Their content strategy is now multi-channel (web, mobile, ebook and print), multi-product, user focused containing multiple combinations. They also focus on discoverability. Underpinning principles set the framework for think about how they deliver these things. Wates was clear about the need to win hearts and minds internally when outsourcing. If colleagues aren't fully on board they can undermine the work.

The benefits of outsourcing include:

• increased productivity and cost savings
• redeployment of in-house staff
• speed to market
• efficiency
• access to competencies
• access to tools.

Often, you may face a challenge at senior level, where there is lack of understanding of process and tools. This has led them to focus on tools for content management. Other areas to consider are the commoditization of production services, how vendor expertise is developing and widening, flexible approaches and ways of slicing the functions to outsource.

Perceived downsides of outsourcing have to be taken into account. These can include concerns around loss of control, quality and time zone factors. The impact of growing economies and exposure to exchange rate fluctuations, staff turnover,  as well as takeovers and company failure are also areas of concern.

And what about quality issues? It helps to pin down exactly what they are: style, language, layout, timeliness – of these, the most critical is XML. Wates also defined the 'scrutiny effect' whereby the extra attention given to outsourced work may require higher quality levels than previously existed.

In the future Wates believes that speed to market, greater consistency and further standardisation will be critical. New media and enriched content will facilitate a move away from a print-oriented way of thinking about outsourcing.

Outsourcing: the good, the bad and the ugly. Richard Fidczuk on to onshore or offshore?

Richard Fidczuk: onshoring

Richard Fidczuk is Production Director at SAGE Publications. Constant change in both journals and books businesses means the need exists to be able to adapt processes, workflows and systems to meet changing requirements. People are needed to develop these processes, workflows and systems. Managing resources is key. They have developed an insourced approach to offshoring by establishing their Delhi office.

When done well, the benefits are clear: being able to offshore staffing for production has meant reductions of 27% per page costs. Delhi handles SAGE owned journals with society contracts handled from London, due to the complexity of relationship and potential perceived (versus real) issues. He advises not to focus on new processes that are not ready for outsourcing as they are not stable enough.

Growth has enabled them to keep staff after they have off-shored functions. But it wouldn't be large enough alone to cover all staff, so they've looked at the business to change the way they do things so in order to redeploy staff. As their business has been in a state of perpetual change, it has freed them to think about how they can adapt processes to change.

Individual production editor tasks have evolved. They now have end to end responsibility, for online as well as print, with a shift to article based production. SAGE has created a new role - Production Innovation Manager which focuses on the case for improvements to production workflows - particularly around completely new products. They coordinate implementation of changes to processes/workflows and work across departments. They have also established a Global Supplier Manager who handles the relationships with all their typesetting suppliers. Other specialist roles have focused on XML, system specialists/super users, peer review system (using fundref and crossref) and open access expertise (e.g. managing payment interface with finance dealing with licensing issues). They have also used staff to support the training of teams in the Delhi office, to build understanding of the processes that will enable them to work most efficiently.

Other areas that SAGE have successfully off-shored to Delhi include:

• marketing data specialists now based in India with analysis undertaken in London
• production and permissions clearance management for SAGE major works
• journals peer review - SAGETRACK - out to Delhi
• design, book covers and marketing materials 
• IT development.

Fidczuk's final bit of advice? They have found that people find it a lot easier to change and adapt if there are real opportunities to develop and take on new roles.

Kathy Law on Outsourcing: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Kathy Law is a publishing professional with over 30 years' experience in both sales and distribution roles, most recently in business development and publication management at MPS and HighWire Press. She is a member of ALPSP's Professional Development Committee and is a co-opted member of the main Council.

Here, she reflects on the challenges publishers face when outsourcing all or part of their activity.

"For many organisations, outsourcing is not a daily event, but is a major shift for the organisation that can be fraught with potholes for the unwary or unprepared. There is the sense of losing control, where work is not done the way you normally do it. Sometimes, it can seem difficult to get your message or instructions across. And what do you do when you aren't getting the right results?

Poorly defined work specifications and unrealistic expectations about who does what and how much often lead to vendors not delivering what you expected. Confusion over how the outsourced activity will be managed can contribute to an unsatisfactory, and potentially costly outcome.

Sometimes it pays to take a step back and look at the challenges, good practices and pitfalls around outsourcing. There are many functions that can be outsourced. Ask yourself the following:

• Are you going to just outsource the ubiquitous typesetting scenarios? This is a hugely important area and probably the first thing to get outsourced by a publisher. 
• Are you interested in outsourcing sales and marketing functions? 
• What about hosting, content enhancement and conversion? 
• And let's not forget copy editing, proofreading and other editorial functions. 

There is much to learn from talking through your outsourcing with a range of potential vendors and other publishers. The more insight you gain into what can go right or wrong - the good, the bad, and the ugly - the more likely you'll be able to be make sound decisions when selecting and working with your supplier.

Don't forget that it's not just a straight transactional relationship, there are also valuable insights to be had on handling cultural differences. Crucially, think about how outsourcing can be turned into a benefit for your publishing activity by allowing you to re-focus affected staff into positive channels of other activity.

In my experience, the more thought that goes into these areas, the more positive and successful the outsourcing relationship will be."

Kathy will be sharing her experience at the ALPSP seminar Outsourcing: the good, the bad and the ugly on 12 June in London. Book your ticket now.