Featured Image

Building Successful Manufacturing Partnerships for the Future

The more complex the global marketplace becomes, the more attractive the idea of partnership is to many companies. Companies typically enter partnerships to seek benefits they cannot access themselves, and they seek partners for several reasons...
Jan 29, 2021

Authors: Ryan Kelly, Tim Shinbara

The more complex the global marketplace becomes, the more attractive the idea of partnership is to many companies. Companies typically enter partnerships to seek benefits they cannot access themselves, and they seek partners for several reasons, including access to complementary capabilities, greater financial strength, access to new markets, to pool resources, or to reduce risk. As such, companies that partner may gain an advantage in the marketplace over companies who lack the skills to collaborate effectively.

Although there are many different types of partnerships, principal partnership models include:

  • Supplier/customer partnerships: Partnerships in which the parties have done business together.

  • Partnerships between peers/competitors: Partnerships where companies pool resources to gain a benefit too expensive to acquire alone, such as access to an advanced technology.

  • Joint development partnerships: Partnerships where companies jointly pursue a venture such as access to a new market or to gain scale efficiencies by combining assets and operations to share risk for major investments or projects.

  • Corporate/startup relationships: Partnerships where the larger company typically provides financial resources, and the startup provides a new technology or service.

  • Public-private partnerships: Partnerships between private companies and entities at local, state, or federal levels. At the federal level alone, there are 58 programs in 11 federal agencies that provide support to U.S. manufacturing with hundreds of millions of dollars in aid available.

  • Academic institutions: Partnerships in which companies often obtain early-stage research from universities and gain access to the best scientific and engineering minds in specific domains. 

Successful partnerships don’t just happen without effort. Strong partners set a clear foundation for business relationships and nurture them. They emphasize accountability within and across partner companies, and they use metrics to gauge success. They are also flexible and willing to compromise if needed. Focusing on these priorities can help partnerships thrive and create additional value. While pursuing partnerships requires effort, and there may be tradeoffs, the work and preparation necessary to make your company a good partner – greater self-awareness, ability to generate alignment, strong communication skills, ability to learn and incorporate learnings into strategy – will very likely help make your company a stronger business in the long run.

For some companies, partnerships are the essential ingredient to grow and thrive in an increasingly complex and unpredictable marketplace. In the near future, a company’s collaborative advantage – the ability to leverage effective strategic and operational relationships with other companies – could be more fundamental to winning than what we refer to as competitive advantage today.

To read more about the value of partnerships in industry, read the full white paper here.

PicturePicture
Author
Ryan Kelly
General Manager, San Francisco Tech Lab
Recent intelligence News
Choose Chicago’s Tourism Ambassador Award was presented to AMT’s Peter Eelman, thanks to his key contributions to the city and the global manufacturing technology industry.
ANCA turns 50. Acu-Rite rebrands. Veterans-turned-machinists graduate from Workshops for Warriors. EOS’ new training center addresses industrial additive education. Edge Technologies, Haimer, Methods Machine Tools, and MMT welcome new hires and promotions.
The manufacturing technology community’s source for updates on major promotions, new appointments, facility inaugurations, and other noteworthy developments among AMT members. Stay informed and join us in recognizing the achievements of your colleagues.
Kevin Bowers brings decades of technical and research experience to his new role as AMT Vice President of Research.
Through his immense contributions to the manufacturing industry — and the people leading it — Ralph H. Hegman becomes the 11th winner of this prestigious award.
Similar News
undefined
International
By Arun Mahajan | Feb 01, 2021

India’s manufacturing PMI ended the year at 56.4, a very healthy number. The unemployment rate has dropped to 6.5%, a further sign of recovery. Passenger vehicle sales in December rose by nearly 14% year-over-year...

2 min
undefined
International
By Hubert Sawicki | Jan 26, 2021

After a very sluggish 2020, due in no small part to the pandemic, European manufacturing metrics and opportunities are improving. The EU is making vast investments in the future of electric vehicles and renewable energy, and the defense sector remains...

2 min
Featured Image
Technology
By AMT | Jan 13, 2021

Cyber-Physical Machine Tools (CPMT) are becoming ubiquitous parts of manufacturing sectors. CPMT offer immense potentials in the current CNC machine tool through integrating the machine tool and the machining process using computation and networking to...

1 min