3 Key Recommendations for Growing your Business through Partnerships

To serve the needs of their customers, manufacturing companies are now placing a greater focus on cultivating a collaborative ecosystem of partners, each with specific technological and domain expertise, all working together to support better, more productive outcomes.

In a thriving partner ecosystem, the sum of collaboration is of greater value to the end customer than the individual parts. OEMs, distributors, system integrators and technology partners can all play an important role in growing the combined value and evolving the ecosystem’s capabilities to be more responsive to market needs.

As customers navigate an increasingly complex landscape of hardware and software, a partnership-led approach can produce significant benefits. This includes helping explore potential advances in manufacturing technologies such as edge, advanced analytics, cybersecurity, IIoT and augmented reality (AR). But what is the best way to establish this growth and how can your business cultivate this type of ecosystem? Here are three important areas to consider.

3 Recommendations for Growing your Business through Partnerships

1. Identify businesses with skill sets and capabilities that don’t currently exist in your organization

Digital skills are in scarce supply. Businesses are wrestling with the predicament of whether to grow the skills internally or pursue alternative methods such as outsourcing or acquisitions. However, there remains a third option.

By closely partnering with organizations who can fill the gaps you’re experiencing, it enables your business to tap into niche expertise and make them available to your customers. Accessing this expertise doesn’t preclude you from developing strategies in parallel to build these skills internally over time.

Working with businesses from diverse fields also helps to develop a more rounded view of change in the sector. This ensures you gain a clearer understanding from your peers on what the future of manufacturing is going to look like and how you can take your business to the next level.

2. Be clear on the value exchange

Partnerships require a mutual exchange of value. Reciprocation works most effectively when both parties can clearly articulate what’s unique about their business and go-to-market approach. Being able to demonstrate these unique capabilities and relationships, such as with distinguished customers and suppliers, can help to make your business more attractive as a network partner.

For more established businesses, a partnership approach can help in gaining insights from nimble, innovative companies that are leading the way in a particular technology or capability, such as cybersecurity specialists or AR pioneers. For smaller or younger companies, the partnership allows them to lean on the expertise of technology leaders, to build credibility in the market, which can then be used to back up their own technical expertise.

The co-creation process between partners allows you to identify opportunities that wouldn’t otherwise be visible. With the market for digital solutions growing, having a network helps companies access new, more fertile areas. Following which they can work together to concept, design, test, communicate, validate, commission, and operate new approaches in manufacturing.

Technology naturally galvanizes a wide range of expertise and provides a foundation for the sort of collaboration that will be essential in the new world of manufacturing. Through this ecosystem, you get the best of everything without compromising your own capabilities to create a more scalable business growth.

3. Focus on the customer’s perspective

Manufacturing businesses are looking for partners that can give their business a boost and help to make products and services more distinctive. When supported by an effective ecosystem, you can satisfy end-customer needs through more comprehensive solutions that offers a one-stop-shop to help advance digital transformation goals.

After all, customers don’t just want technology – they want to receive a consultative sales approach that pinpoints problems and walks them through the necessary steps to address them. A well-rounded combination of resources helps partners offer customers a solution through which they can innovate, solve problems, and bring products to market quicker. The partners are therefore not simply builders, suppliers, or service providers – they combine into digital transformation partners that help find smarter ways of production.

The use of a ‘digital proof of concept’ process is an important part of taking the customer on that journey, showing them how various partner expertise will help reduce financial and reputational risks associated with technology adoption.

Accessing Partner Opportunities through Rockwell Automation PartnerNetwork^TM

Rockwell Automation’s PartnerNetwork^TM is an example of this type of ecosystem where distributors, technology partners, system integrators and OEM machine builders come together. The network is a crucial component in our growth ambitions, and we have invested significantly in partner expansion, including recruitment, onboarding, and nurturing. The network helps our partners with business development, knowledge, upskilling, strategy, and greater visibility to our customers.

The benefits of this type of ecosystem do not only come from working collaboratively with us directly, but also from collaborating with one another to achieve more than we could alone. We have a clear route to market, augmented by the connections formed through partner-to-partner interaction and encourage all partners to work closely together for collective benefits and strengthen digital capabilities in areas such as software, cybersecurity, machine vision and artificial intelligence.

This is the future of manufacturing, and we are embracing it to make sure we, and all our partners, can offer the best and latest solutions to customers.

Our PartnerNetwork^TM ecosystem enables us to redefine the possibilities together, grow through collaboration, reinforce the value of our global community and advance customer success. Find out more here.