Supply Chain Cost Management: The AIM & DRIVE® Process for Achieving Extraordinary Results

Avoid Getting Dragged into Negotiations

When teams meet on AIM & DRIVE projects it is important that the focus be on the collaborative effort to execute an action plan that they wrote earlier. However, it is human to forget that and fall into a “negotiation mode,” especially when the action plan is not going as well as expected. It is very important that you not fall into this trap—and a terrible trap it is! A company I worked with in Germany had a disastrous experience with a supplier even though the initial strategy showed that there were potential savings of millions of euros. What happened was that the customer’s representative who happened to be from Procurement could not draw the line between collaboration and negotiation. On every conference ...