The Limebridge Alliance

Peter Massey of Budd, a founder member of the LimeBridge Alliance, has sent us details of the first get together of the ten member companies in the alliance. It took place in Seattle in October, well actually on Lopez Island close to the US Canadian border between Seattle and Vancouver, where Bill Price of Driva Solutions, the US LimeBridge founder member, has a holiday home. As Peter explains it; " its just like BA and One World alliance - each company is autonomous eg Budd in the UK, but we share things for our clients' benefit through collaboration within the LimeBridge alliance."

"The get-together was a mixture between working, camping, partying and going without sleep says Peter. We spent quite a bit of time on the first day getting more detail on what we have in the ten countries and companies to share: - experiences, knowledge, methods, clients and so on. The second day we discussed where we are taking our autonomous businesses and how we could help each other through our collaboration within LimeBridge.

We are very pleased with the strength in depth in both customer operations and change we have around the alliance. Just to take a couple of examples:

1 India. "MD" from Celtycs in Bangalore built and ran Dell's offshore contact centre there; Bill from Driva in the US runs a "Global Outsource Council" of the top users of offshore outsourcing having taken Amazon out there three years ago; Budd examined the major outsource players there last year and is now running projects moving processes to India.
2 Japan. Budd has been doing work structuring a CRM strategy with Taniguchi of e.Partners for a consumer company. Taniguchi and Tony Bruno from Contact Consulting in Hong Kong have been collaborating on a global investor's potential investment in a Japanese company. e.Partners is helping a US client of Driva on how it supports its customers and operates its sales force in Japan.

The strength of collaboration in an alliance like LimeBridge helps local and global clients get what they want - a real alternative to using big consulting firms with ever bigger projects. They want knowledgeable practitioners who have been there, who know the local and international practicalities and who make things happen for customers and clients."

They say the world is becoming a smaller place and collaborative working, as in LimeBridge, is making it smaller. Getting together from Sydney & Singapore, Hannover and Hong Kong proves it. However the flight costs have come down considerably but the jet lag remains real. Still not enough to put off the LimeBridge members committing to meeting again in Kyoto in 6 months time and Bangalore 6 months later.

For further information on LimeBridge members and services or links to Budd in the UK, see www.limebridge.com or contact Peter Massey on [email protected]