The Capacity Dilemma; Short-term Solutions Available!

In one of the recent partner meetings, the nightmare of every channel marketing person came true: The partner was refusing to take more leads! It was not because the quality of the leads was bad, nor was the partner thinking the leads would be overprized. He simply denied, because he had no more capacity to follow up on new projects.

I think many of our partners have been in such a situation. They can’t simply take on more customers, because capacity is limited and they don’t want to compromise on quality.

Of course, this is a difficult situation and in the past years, I have seen many initiatives to create new capacity by nurturing talents at universities and driving graduates to get into the Business Application space. While this is the right investment in our future, most of these initiatives are more long-term time and typically do not scale as required. Arguably Microsoft invests in product development to make sure the new generation of Dynamics 365 products are faster to implement and therefore do not consume as much capacity.

Yet in the past few months, we have seen 2 great solutions that can have short term impact on our partner’s capacity and that are scalable.

Upgrade services

Most projects do not start from scratch, typically customers have an existing solution for ERP or CRM that they want to migrate to more modern platforms. A huge part of such migration projects is time consuming, low value work that consumes precious time of consultants and technical people. With companies such as 1 Click Factory, QBS group is now offering Dynamics Upgrade service, so you can outsource most of the low value, high time consumption work and focus your people on the high value work. From first cases, we get very positive feedback that partners can free up capacity drastically, while saving cost at same time.

Once partners are following that simple structure, they can see how much capacity can be gained.

Yet this approach requires that the partner structures the project on a new dimension, what parts are low level workloads to be outsources vs. the ones that should still be in-house. Once partners are following that simple structure, they can see how much capacity can be gained by using outsourced services such as our upgrade offerings

Resource Optimisation

All of our partners are profiled in Dynasource, which is a new marketplace to share IT projects and talents. So you can either offer a project where you need additional capacity or you need expertise that you don’t have in-house or in case you have resources available, you can shop for projects and “rent out” your resources to other partners. Like with all disruptive business models, there is an initial reservation. Can I trust the person I source in? Can I make sure that my most valuable resources are not hired by another partner? It’s all a matter of trust and leaving one’s comfort zone. However, with first projects being handled through the Dynasource platform, we see the early movers in our community creating instant capacity through this model.

Dynasource offers you the possibility to hire experienced subject matter experts for existing projects or new projects.

I am convinced that if our partners are taking advantage of both options to create capacity, they will enjoy a larger customer base and higher profits. And in the end, what was the nightmare of a channel marketing person, to have partners reject leads because of capacity constraints, will become confined to history 😊. If you want to know more about these services and how we can help you to create capacity and enlarge your customer base, please contact one of our regional offices or send me an email.

Michael Hartmann