Geo-dispersed IT project deployment:

How to pull the strings in the supply channel

Deadlines don’t catch viruses

Blogs about supply chain problems arising from the pandemic have spread round the world as fast as the virus did. We all get it; times were tough. Now, as light seemingly appears on the horizon, the shock waves ripple through supply chains in every industry, with global IT supplies taking their own share of the hit.

In the tech field, HP’s CEO has said: “When I say backlog is close to one full quarter, this gives you the magnitude of the orders that we are not able to fulfill. Usually our business is demand-driven. Today, our business is totally driven by supply.”¹

For the uninitiated, it’s a scramble for equipment followed by a slow and painful hacking through the jungle of international laws, customs requirements, import procedures, and officialdom that is becoming more nervous and officious than it’s ever been before.

International Rescue

This is a blog about people helping people; solutions, ways through. It’s about the channel that runs parallel to the channel that so many people discuss as ‘being broken’. My credo is that wherever there’s a way through, we’ll find it. If we can’t find it, then we’ll find someone who can, and it there’s no way through, there’s very likely going to be a way round. The trick is in knowing the people who can help you find it; ‘international rescue’ leveraging experience, skill, and a little help from our friends around the world.

Every time a deadline is shifted due to a failure to meet it, someone somewhere loses out commercially, and the opportunity that passes by may never return. This is the case with the relaxation of online gaming laws in the U.S. where, once a company has been granted a license to operate, there’s a fixed time window to start operating.

The relationship channel

I don’t buy in to the view that the channel is broken, but I do think it tends to be characterised by some pretty rigid modes of operation borne out of the global magnitude of the key players (vendors) within it; someone else pulling the strings, leaving you sometimes dangling in the hope that they’ll pull them on your behalf. It doesn’t always go that way.

With supply shortages in just about every area of technology—compounded by the seemingly endless bureaucracy involved in deployment of a geo-dispersed project—many companies are struggling to grab hold of that elusive post-Covid growth. Let’s also not forget that vendors are struggling too.

So, when vendors align their current customer priorities, it’s small wonder that emergency and essential services, governments, health services, and defence customers occupy positions right at the top of the agenda. This is where escalations are swung into action; that expedient balance between the moral imperative and the commercial objective.

The price-trust divide

Many years ago, at Viadex, we evaluated the best way to add value both for our customers and for our strategic vendor partners to ensure mutual benefit for all parties.

The backdrop is that we’ve been working with many of our customers for decades. Their trust in us isn’t based on price. Nobody trusts anybody because of price. They trust us because we get things done, in over 190 countries; problem scenarios have long been the norm for us.

These are scenarios that vendors are not always structured to deal with, even if they wanted to. Customers are unaccustomed to navigating the complexities of global deployments. That leaves a big gap between plans, and making them happen; that’s where we come in.

We know people on the ground and we earn their trust. Some years back we also changed our internal remuneration for our own people. We’re committed to the value of long-term strategic connections with the partners, distributors, and vendors we work with. To make sure it was an approach that truly defined our ethos and drove the actions and behaviours of our team we did away with targets and their self-serving partner in crime, commission-based remuneration for our sales team.

The hard sell doesn’t help anybody. Building relationships that last and bring value is about knowing that people who understand the problems are there on your side; not looking for the angle on your enquiry that will give them the chance to make money.

A focus on sales means a focus on profits. It brings time pressures that mean your people lose interest in serving you if they can’t sniff a sizeable and fast pay-off. How can that work? How can it deliver the best outcomes for a client when a sales person wants to tick off the next step in moving closer to target goals, and calculate the commission coming his or her way? To be honest; it’s counterintuitive. It’s not necessarily in your interests, but it’s definitely in the interests of the person selling to you.

A hard year coming

At this current time, the industry is looking at three- to four-month lead times at the very best. These are the lead times that, pre-Covid, were immediate. The order of the day is to focus pretty much immediately on projects you have coming up six to twelve months down the line and view them through the lens of everything carrying on getting worse before a glimmer of it getting better.

The problems lie at the heart of computing. “The semiconductor situation is going to take a long time to fix,” says U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo. “This is one I feel confident saying it’s not going to be fixed in a month or two, or six, or 12 months.”

A knock-on effect will ripple throughout the hardware world. If you have projects planned across the next 6 to 12 months this is the time to talk to us at Viadex to set plans in place. If you are a globally dispersed business in the middle of a project and are facing challenges – Viadex is incorporated in nine territories and has a proven track record we can lean on in each of those territories to try and help you or your partner out.

Wherever and whenever appropriate we also continue to expand our local presence. We’re incorporating an operation in South America and by so doing we can now save up to 60% on import duties for customers needing to import IT equipment into Brazil. Let me stress, this is not about price, it’s about having the in-territory presence and savviness to be able to contain unnecessary costs.

Viadex are Go

Our international relationships have been built over more than 20 years. When the rules and problems are hampering your plans, we know ways of working round the rules, pulling the right strings.

As a case in point at the height of the pandemic we came to the rescue of one of the world’s top ten technology hardware vendors. A £750,000 hardware order had been delayed due to the problems I’ve been referring to here. When they were finally able to deliver, the wrong equipment was dispatched and landed in destination country. It needed rapid resolution. It needed huge cooperation across the supply chain and especially with the customs officials on the ground. We understand these things. Global deployment is what we do, Global relationships are what enable us to do it. We resolved the issue.

It all looks set to get better but nowhere as quickly as the commercial world, and its customers, need it to. This, at Viadex, is the situation in which we thrive.

If you want seamless global expansion, or have an associated problem, drop me a line. Meet the right people for the best outcome now.

Thanks for reading.

¹The Register, August 2021