Enabling Diversity

Best Practices

• Enable partners as a way of enhancing your own profits. By taking a collaborative, consultative approach with its vendor partners, Office Depot was able to provide the vendors with skills and tools that have allowed them to expand their businesses — and win new business for Office Depot, too.
• Consider how new solutions will affect your partners. When it went looking for a procure-to-pay platform to support its Tier One Program, in addition to its own needs, Office Depot kept in mind the limited technical capabilities of its small enterprise vendor-partners as well as the advanced e-commerce requirements of its target Fortune 500 customers, and it found a solution to meet both needs.
• Remember: Bigger is not always better — at least where solutions are concerned. Office Depot currently has relationships with many of the major e-procurement and e-payment solution providers, but it found that working with Osiris Solutions, a relatively smaller solution provider, was a better fit for the Tier One Program because Osiris was able to be very agile in working with the involved parties, and fast and flexible in configuring its solution to meet diverse requirements.