Creating Profit Through Alliances - business models for collaboration E-book | Page 53

TNT has bundled a large number of these mail
services within a network, the Mail Alliance. This
alliance mainly competes with Deutsche Post and has
the purpose of distributing mail that has to be
delivered outside the borders of an individual region,
to other parties within the Mail Alliance. All
participating companies work together on the basis of
one IT system and one set of sorting rules, which
enables the „roaming‟ between the networks. The
conditions to have one‟s mail delivered in another
region are similar for all participants.
Unusual supplier risk
Contracting-out work to a supplier generally does not
qualify as an alliance. It usually concerns a purchasing
transaction, with the service or product and its costs
specified beforehand. Thus, there is no question of
shared risks or joint management.
There are some exceptions, however; for instance in
outsourcing, where the client's personnel are
transferred. The result is that the supplier's production
capacity increases, without any solid guarantees of
higher sales. The collaboration is based on the
assumption that the supplier has more options of
putting people to work than the client. The client
transfers a large portion of his knowledge and work
processes to the supplier, that puts his business
operation at some risk. He will therefore want to
have a certain measure of operational control in
return.

decides on the surrounding infrastructure and thus
can influence the number of cars using that road. On
the other hand, the multiple-year contract means
that the public authority has a lot less control over
the operation of the road, and will therefore seek
assurances with respect to its operational
management.
Here, too, the cost advantages of collaborating are
generally easy to calculate, taking into account the
risks associated with the dependence on the partner.
The collaboration hinges on the fact that the supplier
is better able to plan, organise and finance certain
activities. The specificity of these activities makes it
possible to have several suppliers bid against each
other in a public tender process.
The extent to which commissioning companies are
open to the tendering of work in the form of alliances
differs per country. When we look at the construction
of infrastructure (roads, gas pipes, water purification
facilities), this appear to be quite common in the
United Kingdom. In the Netherlands, the Ministry of
Finance has set up a knowledge centre about publicprivate partnerships, and this approach is gradually
becoming more familiar. In Germany the
commissioning party tends to divide the work into
small functional parcels, in order to contract these out
at the lowest possible cost.

Public-private partnerships sometimes entail an
above-average risk for the supplier as well. Imagine,
for instance, a construction company that not only
undertakes to build a road, but also to be responsible
for its maintenance, the financing, and its operation.
This clearly creates a strong dependency on the
commissioning public authority, which for example
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