ASAP Announces 2018 Alliance Excellence Awards Finalists

CANTON, Mass. (PRWEB) January 25, 2018

The winners will be announced at a ceremony at the 2018 ASAP Global Alliance Summit, “Propelling Partnering for the On-Demand World: New Perspectives + Proven Practices for Collaborative Business,” to be held March 26-28 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA. ASAP’s Summit is the world’s largest alliance management education opportunity. Participants gain access to the latest trends in the profession and receive accolades for their contributions to the profession’s thought leaders.

The Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP), the world’s leading professional association dedicated to the practice of alliance management, partnering, and business collaboration, announced this year’s finalists for the annual ASAP Global Alliance Excellence Awards. Nine candidates are competing for the top spots in four different awards categories: Alliance for Corporate Social Responsibility; Alliance Program Excellence; Individual Alliance Excellence; Innovative Best Alliance Practice.

“The Alliance Excellence Awards hold a special place in ASAP’s history and mandate,” remarked Michael Leonetti, CSAP, and ASAP president and CEO, when discussing the high value of the awards. “They indicate the level of progress in alliance management, especially during a time of complex multi-industry partnering. Businesses are adapting to new platforms, artificial intelligence, and customer demands. The awards are a way of acknowledging innovative progress and a reminder of how important it is for businesses, CEOs, alliance managers, and others to stay flexible and up-to-date on how to foster and adapt to change in their industries.”

Medimmune—The global biologics research and development arm of AstraZeneca created an alliance information management system and dashboard reporting tools that enable widespread visibility of alliance performance in near real time, including consolidation of alliance data that provides visibility across the organization; alliance dashboards accessible through mobile devices as well as computers; enhanced tracking of key contractual obligations and to support governance and data-driven decision making. The changes enabled employees to see the big picture by aggregating information across the alliance portfolio.

The finalists will be singled out for their exceptional leadership and contributions in the following categories:

JDA—The software company re-architected its partner program in response to new market opportunities and a shift in customer demand for solutions in the cloud. The Partner Advantage Program launched in April 2017, employing many best practices of modern partner ecosystems. One challenge was to reorient the culture of the company to work more collaboratively with partners and, in particular, with systems integrators who were often regarded as competitors to the company’s internal professional services organization. In response, JDA launched a number of initiatives and tools to help reshape the culture.

Pierre Fabre—The French pharmaceutical company has successfully deployed SharePoint Alliance Management, which unifies how alliances are managed by:

Alliance for Corporate Social Responsibility: The award is presented for making a profound, measurable, and positive social impact, with the principal objective social impact, not profit—although profit, especially if used to fund program expansion, is not discouraged.

The Alliance Program Excellence Award: This award is given to organizations that have instilled the capability to consistently implement and manage alliance portfolios and demonstrate consistent success of those alliances over time.

Shire—The pharmaceutical company has introduced a new best practice for partner crisis management. This unique practice adds a new tool for alliance professionals to manage stakeholders through a crisis situation. It was originally developed to help navigate a merger but has since been tested and validated across several crisis situations.

The Individual Alliance Excellence Award: The award targets a specific alliance for excellence in planning, implementation, and results, either between two companies or multiple organizations. The alliance must have instituted practices, tools, and methodologies in support of successful formation and management.

The Innovative Best Alliance Practice Award: This award is presented to a company for individual alliance management tools, functions, methods, or processes that have made an immediate and powerful impact on the organization and/or discipline of alliance management. The high-impact tool or process must show results, such as easing management, saving costs, increasing speed, and/or growing revenue.

The 2018 awards finalists are:

Amgen—The biopharma company’s alliance management program is recognized for being founded on three pillars:

Cisco-Dimension Data—The tech companies combined forces to celebrate their 25th anniversary as an alliance by kicking off 25 projects focused on creating social good, ultimately resulting in a record year for the partnership. Over 260 employees participated in 10 different countries aligning around the same core principles for projects that focused on a diversity of social causes, service, and strengthening shared priorities.

Merck KGaA—The pharmaceutical company is being acknowledged for collecting and managing some unusual alliance KPIs for value creation, risk mitigation, and problem solving, resulting in an improvement in effective decision making; alignment of joint objectives; identification of alliance opportunities; increase in the number of opportunities; value creation.

MSD–Julphar—Global pharmaceutical company MSD and the United Arab Emirates’ Julphar formed the DUNES alliance to serve seven therapeutic areas for six countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Business development has been problematic in this part of the world, but through the introduction of alliance management tools, processes, and training, the companies have created sustainable businesses. The success of the alliance opened doors for other multinational biopharmaceuticals to invest in the local markets and establish alliances.

Dassault Systèmes‚ÄîThe 3-D experience software company put together an effective social video marketing campaign to build awareness and spark interest among customers. While partner videos aren‚Äôt new, the extent to which Dassault has embedded social video marketing into its partner program and scale it across its technology alliance community is unusual and innovative, resulting in boosted partner engagement as measured by key performance indicators (KPIs) tracked in views, view rate percentage, and engagement parameters.

ABOUT ASAP
The Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP) is the only professional association dedicated to elevating and promoting the profession of alliance management, partnerships, and collaboration. Founded in 1998, the organization provides professional development, networking, and resources for cultivating the skills and toolsets needed to manage successful business partnerships. ASAP‚Äôs professional certifications include the Certificate of Achievement-Alliance Management (CA-AM) and Certified Strategic Alliance Professional (CSAP). Active global members include Astellas, AstraZeneca, Bayer, Cisco, Citrix, Covance, Dassault Systèmes, Eli Lilly and Company, HealthCore, Huawei, IBM, Janssen‚ÄîPharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson, JDA, Merck, Microsoft, Mission Pharmacal, NetApp, Novartis, Plantronics, Salesforce, Sanofi, SAS, Schneider Electric, Takeda, The Warren Company, and Xerox. A complete list of global members is available at http://www.strategic-alliances.org.