You’ve seen this before, perhaps. On paper, everything looked fine.
Our logistics partner was hitting every pickup window; our carriers generally met transit SLAs; the warehouse was definitely locked in on its KPIs. Yet our stores kept running out of our new product only on the weekends, while the site still showed “in stock.” The root cause was not performance; it was stale data. We had a similar problem with a paint manufacturer that I wrote a paper about in my Data Science Master's Degree at SMU (if you care to learn more about that).
Diagnosing the data, our inventory snapshots were moved via CSVs once a day; promotions changed every few hours; no one shared the same truth at the same time. Our excellent front-line support team took the heat; marketing had to pull the promos; finance was displeased with expedited shipping costs; and to boot, our partner relationships frayed.
In the postmortem, together with our supply lead, we stopped asking who missed a task and started asking how we work together. We convened a joint session and drafted a one-page Operating Level Agreement that outlined real-time data expectations, a weekly cadence, shared OKRs, and clear decision-making rights.
Within a month, stockouts dropped, and the tone in meetings shifted from contract policing to problem solving...as a cohesive delivery team.
What?
Ecosystem agility requires shifting from vendor management to partnership operations. Contracts set the floor; Operating Level Agreements (OLAs) set the way we work day to day. A good OLA is short enough to read and specific enough to steer, and might change over time.
Core elements of a one-page OLA
Purpose & Scope: “Maintain accurate, real-time product availability for the Earbuds portfolio across partners to protect conversion and customer trust.”
Shared Vocabulary: Define “available to promise”, “ship confirmed”, “time-to-recover”, “on-time-in-full.”
Data Sharing: Source of truth, schema owner, method (API or webhook preferred; SFTP only if necessary), freshness target, uptime SLOs, fallback plan.
Joint Cadence: Weekly 30-minute partnership forum for flow and exceptions; monthly retro; quarterly strategy and OKR reset.
Decision Rights: Who decides forecast changes; who stops a promotion; who reallocates inventory; what thresholds trigger escalation.
Shared OKRs: Examples, KR1: Forecast accuracy within ±8% weekly; KR2: Time-to-recover from a stockout ≤ 12 hours; KR3: Data latency ≤ 5 minutes during promo windows.
Transparent Risks: One shared risk register with owners on both sides; reviewed weekly.
Incentives: Rewards tied to flow and reliability; not unit price alone. Co-fund automation that reduces latency; share savings from reduced expedites.
Design these policies with people in mind, then codify them lightly. Build a cross-company coalition that can sponsor and sustain the new way of working. Notice how this took the work of many teams coming together.
So What?
Without trust, fresh data, and aligned incentives, each company optimizes locally; the ecosystem stalls.
You get the bullwhip effect; cheap units that arrive late; perfect SLAs that still miss the timing; teams “win” their metric while the customer loses.
Leaders then push harder on internal teams, add reports, and tighten compliance; none of that fixes a stale feed or unclear decision rights. With a simple OLA and a small set of shared outcomes, the conversation changes.
Everyone can see the same signal at the same time; exceptions are handled in one rhythm; incentives reward flow, reliability, and recovery speed. Trust becomes an operational asset, not a slogan.
Now What?
Stand up a 30-day partnership pilot this week.
Pick one product line and one partner. Invite supply, logistics, channel, and an agility coach from your side; bring the partner’s ops and technical contact.
Publish a one-page OLA in plain language. Include the seven elements above; start with one shared metric only: forecast accuracy, or time-to-recover.
Install the weekly forum; 30 minutes; same agenda every time:
Signals first (use a simple Process Behavior Chart if you can),
One exception to resolve,
One improvement to try,
Close with a decision and the owner.
Turn on a near-real-time feed for the chosen metric; API or webhook preferred; agree on a fallback snapshot if the feed fails.
Log events openly; when you change a policy or fix a bug in the feed, record it. In two weeks, you will be able to explain why the chart moved.
If your goal is time-to-recover, practice a tiny drill: “If the feed goes stale, who notices, who fixes, and how fast do we fail over?” Small wins compound; that is how trust grows, across the whole ecosystem.
Let's Do This!
Trust is built on transparency and small wins; encode both in how you work together.
An OLA is not another contract; it is a lightweight agreement to share data in real time, decide faster, and pursue the same outcomes. Start with one product, one partner, one shared metric; meet weekly; celebrate one tangible improvement.
As reliability rises and "fire drills" fade, people will feel the difference first; the dashboards will catch up.