In telecom sourcing, suppliers know more than buyers about effort and risk. The speaker recommends moving past information secrecy toward cost intelligence, standardization, and benchmarking to level the playing field.
I think in telecom services particularly, the starting point is very different from what we see in products actually. So suppliers typically have information advantage here around efforts, productivity, execution, risk. So the conventional trade-off between, let's say, collaboration and negotiation almost inverts. And also we have a typical situation. It's not between supplier and buyer, it's also the buyer's customer in the angle. So basically the information flow is between these 3 parties, and in certain situations our supplier is getting more feed from our end customer. At times we also take suppliers' help to gather more information. So in the services sourcing particularly, I think this is a very typical situation. So So if you are negotiating with the insufficient visibility into what things actually should actually cost, so yeah, I think so. We need to acknowledge this structural reality a little bit. Then we stop treating information protection as our primary negotiation tool here. Yeah, I think because you know the supplier information advantage against us is much larger. More consequential than the advantage over them. So I mean, to close the gap, it's more, you know, the cost intelligence, standardization, structured benchmarking are the tools that you use in order to have a better negotiation outcome.
