Sourcing Value

SMS offers independent, objective analysis and assessment of customer/supplier partnerships, performance and service levels. We frequently act as "Trusted Third Party" to give impartial, objective and practical advice where an outsourced partnership is not delivering the expected benefits, working with customer and supplier to improve the end to end process of software development and maintenance.

• Planning and project audit - A reliable and objective process for selecting suppliers, assessing risk and reviewing on-going projects and partnerships.
• Supplier Selection - SEIsm based capability evaluation of a preferred supplier or suppliers for given packages of work. This also identifies issues or risks to the work that may be a consequence of using each supplier
• Contract Management - A set of processes for management of the work subcontracted to those suppliers, to ensure compliance and ameliorate the issues and risks involved.

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How does it work?

Initially an organisation identifies a group of potential suppliers based on its requirements. SMS assist the refinement of this primary supplier selection using a set of services including:

• the Software Engineering Institute's (SEI) Supplier Capability Evaluation (SCE) method
• Performance Measurement and Analysis of past work
• Benchmarking comparision against industry best practice

This assesses their capability and identifies the final suppliers that are most likely to deliver the required solution. Productivity, speed of delivery, quality, cost, previous project experience and staff are some areas likely to be considered, amongst others, when reviewing the supplier's capability.

Once the supplier(s) has been selected progress against plans and conformance to the contract is measured and deviations reported using similar services.

Why is it useful?

Competitive pressures in the private sector and cost pressures in the public sector are forcing more and more software development and maintenance to be contracted out, either via single contracts, or by outsourcing all or part of the services. This is a time consuming and costly process to manage and implement internally, possibly adversely affecting the smooth running of existing commercial operations. By identifying suitable suppliers, likely risks and putting processes in place to manage them we can considerably increase the likelihood of success.

How are these SMS services related?