Paper info

Screening of partner relationships in software business: From commencement to continuous assessment

Juhani Warsta , Minna Lappi and Veikko Seppänen

The paper was published at the 17th IMP-conference in Oslo, Norway in 2001.

The establishment and development of business-to-business relationships arecommonly evaluated from the customers? perspective. In this paper we look theprocess mainly from the opposite direction. We define the supplier's partner selectionprocess as continuous assessment of relationships with customers, rather than merelycommencement needed during the early contract negotiation phase. We haveinvestigated Finnish software companies entering into the USA, to analyze theprocesses and factors related to establishing partner relationships. We will depictrelationship screening as consisting of the commencement process and the continuingscreening process.