Providing Services in the Domestic Market: Lessons Learnt

Very recently we concluded a project, working with a leading wireless telecom carrier in the Indian domestic market. It looked like an ideal project from the outside – big brand, centralized procurement procedure with open and transparent communication, till we received the purchase order. However, there are quite a few lessons I learned about how to (rather how not to) treat your service provider. Though most of the points mentioned in this blog are already been followed by my organization, this post shall be a ready reckoner for the readers and for myself while working with service providers anywhere. 

I Know You, You Know Me

The right hand shall have to know what the left hand is doing

In business, we call it organizational transparency. When initiating a project, be sure that all stakeholders are notified accordingly. When our technical team shortlists a service provider, the procurement team issues a work order, and the project starts rolling. We have an internal mechanism that sets specifications for the work and secures necessary approvals internally before a work order is issued. Hence if the procurement team issues a wok order for a map area of 400 sq. km, my technical team shall not ask the vendor to double the delivery area without securing the necessary internal approvals, and issuing a modified work order.

I am OK, you are OK

You shall receive according to the same measure that you measure for others

My organization is ISO 14001 certified. We take pride in flaunting our green practices – from eliminating administrative paperwork to providing free parking to cyclists. So, I would consider it a carnal sin if anyone in my organization force vendors to submit invoices in print, especially when they themselves issue work orders electronically. We always follow the same standards throughout the project framework, which also covers our service providers.

When in Rome

If the project involves transferring data files of large size, make sure your team has the infrastructure to send and receive them

When dealing with projects involving large chunks of data, be sure that you provide data transfer facilities (both sending and receiving) to your project team. This might mean different things to different people. There are organizations who formally engage providers of data transfer services such as DropBox, OneDrive, Hightail or We Transfer. Others prefer using the good old FTP as a safe and standard mechanism of data transfer. My organization is ISO 27001 certified, and we prefer sending and receiving large files using FTP. Whatever be the method, we ensure to provide a standard FTP account for a vendor, and ask them to deposit the data using that account, rather than forcing the vendor to dump everything by email (up to the extent possible) and panic when the vendor reports that the file size is too large to be sent by email.

Sounds simple enough? Well, unfortunately it is not so when you deal with some leading organizations in the domestic market. It is not always about how you advertise yourself in the media, but also about how to treat your vendors, that shows who you really are.

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