We Are in This Together- Hbr

We’re in This Together

When managers from Wendy’s International and Tyson Foods sat down together in December 2003 to craft a supply chain partnership, each side arrived at the table with misgivings. There were those on the Wendy’s side who remembered all too well the disagreements they’d had with Tyson in the past. In fact, just a few years earlier, Wendy’s had made a formal decision not to buy from Tyson again. On the Tyson side, some people were wary of a customer whose demands had prevented the business from meeting its profit goals.

A few things had changed in the meantime, or the companies wouldn’t have been at the table at all. First, the menu at Wendy’s had shifted with consumer tastes—chicken had become just as important as beef. The restaurant chain had a large-volume chicken supplier, but it wanted to find yet another. Second, Tyson had acquired leading beef supplier IBP, with which Wendy’s had a strong relationship. IBP’s president and COO, Richard Bond, now held the positions of president and COO of the combined organization, so Wendy’s felt it had someone it could work with at Tyson.

One other thing had changed, too. The companies had a new tool, called the partnership model, to help start the relationship off on the right foot. Developed under the auspices of Ohio State University’s Global Supply Chain Forum, the model incorporated lessons learned from the best partnering experiences of that group’s 15 member companies. It offered a process for aligning expectations and determining the level of cooperation that would be most productive.

With this article, we put that tool in your hands. We’ll explain how, over the course of a day and a half, it illuminates the drivers behind each company’s desire for partnership, allows managers to examine the conditions that facilitate or hamper cooperation, and specifies which activities managers in the two companies must perform, and at what level, to implement the partnership. The model—proven at Wendy’s...