In an earlier post, I suggested that customers should focus more on the relationship with their suppliers and less on the current technology features. Because requirements are changing so quickly, the supplier must be able to keep up.

A great relationship should not just be reactive. A good supplier will understand and care enough about the customer's business and changing requirements to proactively suggest improvements that the customer can adopt to get even better results.

In our world, this could be small things like how to better use some of the features in their digital signing solution that the customer isn't aware of (like this cool feature that Secured Signing has, which I taught a customer about last week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHdbOXXXtjA) or introducing the customer to some basic automation they can do with PowerAutomate.

However, it could go a lot further. One of our customers has shared their goals for the next five years, which has helped us understand where they want to get to, and the types of improvements that will help them do it. Working with The SharePoint Agency, who are providing all the customer's M365 support, we've been progressively improving their processes this year to digitise and streamline things as much as possible with that end goal in mind. We're helping them continue growing strongly at a much lower cost while ensuring compliance with legal requirements and best practices in a highly regulated industry.

We have regularly scheduled meetings to discuss what is working well and what could be improved. It's often relatively easy to make several improvements quickly after the meeting.   It's their job to tell us the outcomes they're hoping for, and our job to identify how it can be done. Microsoft is constantly rolling out new functionality, which makes innovation a lot easier.

Supplier innovation is the holy grail for many in the procurement space. It's talked about a lot but rarely delivered in practice. It needs strong and trusting relationships, with a commitment to creating new value and sharing it fairly. But if done well, everyone should feel better off.

It's much more fun working with people and helping them to achieve their goals rather than just delivering automation.

LawHawk is not a technology provider. We're legal operations experts who have identified good technology and partners that we and our customers can work with to get great results over the long term. 

If you'd like to improve and automate your legal processes, and want to know that you've got partners you can trust to keep helping you once the project is delivered, get in touch for a chat.