Strategic Third Party Engagement: The Smart Choice of Leading Companies
We often hear from clients who has previously chosen partners that, rather than increasing their flexibility and providing opportunities to evolve with time, provided inflexible solutions that resulted in a loss of strategic control. That will not happen to you with iControl.
What is Strategic Third Party Engagement?
Strategic Third-Party Engagement with iControl, also known as out-tasking, is fundamentally different from outsourcing. Unlike with traditional outsourcing, our clients do not shut down their IT or finance departments. They do not move any internal operations overseas. Instead, our clients shift tasks and activities that are detracting from the ability of internal departments to operate at maximum efficiency to iControl staff, often working on-site at our client location, or from our headquarters in Burtonsville, MD. The outcome: Internal departments that have more time and resources to focus on strategic business goals, versus internal departments that are overwhelmed with mind-numbing repetitive menial tasks.
What are Some Examples of Out-Tasking?
Many clients who out-task to iControl have increasingly fewer internal resources, especially in IT and finance. Those limited resources, in turn, are being tasked with interacting with an increasing universe of trade partners with varying needs and levels of sophistication.
Whether it is manual pricebook, promotions and item file maintenance – which iControl can fully automate for all levels of your organization – or the need to send data files in different formats on different schedules to an array of different trade partners – which iControl can entirely eliminate, Clients who out-task with iControl dramatically reduce costs, waste and headaches associated with the administrative-end of their business.
As importantly, clients do not have to give up control (hence our name: iControl, you are in Control). Our approach to out-tasking improves staff effectiveness and helps you and your team focus on strategic initiatives, allowing for the re-distribution of time and resources to core business areas that directly impact your company’s bottom-line performance.
How Painful is a Transition?
We have built a transition process that ensures that change isn’t painful at all, and that’s as important to us as the outcome. iControl provides its clients a seamless, modular, and customized transition process, based on the specific needs and objectives of each client, and focused on enabling you to transition to our program rapidly and painlessly, without causing disruption to your business.
Our experience working with larger and small retailers alike has helped us develop a simple and straight-forward approach that shifts the burden of transition from your team to ours. Time after time, with retailer after retailer, working with a range of partners from highly sophisticated to those with older or no technology, we have delivered smooth, ripple-free transitions. Ask any of our many satisfied customers!
Financial Benefits
Out-Tasking to iControl allows our clients to reduce costs through reallocation of internal resources, process improvement, and by relying on iControl's economies of scale. The money we save you is available for re-investment in the more strategic parts of your business. iControl will share best practices and ROI models with you to help you evaluate the benefits your company is likely to experience. What you do with your savings and gain is for you to decide.
Operational Benefits
By leveraging best practices, cutting edge technologies and economies of scale, iControl will help you drive change within your company that will result in greater efficiencies and standardization for you and your trade partners. Our program and process will dramatically boost transparency for you and your trade partners. Transparency delivers increased accountability, process improvement, greater collaboration, and less risk for all involved.
If you can see it, you need not fear it.
Your relationship with iControl would be completely different from any traditional "run of the mill" third-party vendors you may have worked with in the past. We often hear from clients who has previously chosen partners that, rather than increasing their flexibility and providing opportunities to evolve with time, provided inflexible solutions that resulted in a loss of strategic control. That will not happen to you with iControl.
When we are hired our mission is straightforward: Save you time, save you money, and find opportunities for you and your trade partners to sell more goods.
