Our Alliances

Our alliances. An extended range of expertise, with an independent perspective.

Like many consultants, West Monroe Partners has taken steps to establish alliance relationships with a select group of vendors. These alliances enable us to deliver additional, specialized expertise in technical areas such as business processes, functional domain knowledge, industry expertise, and vendor product experience. In addition, they enable access to specialized training and customized support at a moment’s notice.

We developed these relationships through years of working side-by-side with some of the best talent in the consulting profession and have integrated these professionals seamlessly on many occasions to provide the additional capacity or specialized skills needed for the job at hand. We use a disciplined approach to identify firms whose products and services meet our strict quality tests, such as top-quartile rankings by The Gartner Group, Forrester, and other third parties.

These relationships provide important benefits for our clients and our professionals. But we approach them with two key principles in mind:

• We do not let alliance relationships affect our solution recommendations.
• And we do not accept monetary compensation from alliance partners.

A technology-independent perspective.

We approach each client situation with a completely product- and technology-independent perspective. We will leverage our alliance relationships, where appropriate, to ensure effective delivery. But we do not allow them to influence our recommendations. In all cases, we come to the table with a technology-independent perspective, and we recommend the approach and solution that we believe is best for your unique needs.

A firm policy on monetary compensation offered by alliance partners.

In today’s market, it is not uncommon for formal alliance relationships between consultants and product or service providers to include some form of compensation that recognizes the consultant’s application or referral of the vendor’s offering as part of its work for clients. This compensation often takes the form of monetary incentives, but it also can be “paid” in the form of product licenses, consultant training, or other benefits.

West Monroe Partners has taken a unique and definitive stand toward the practice of monetary compensation offered by alliance partners. Simply said: we do not accept it.

We have carefully built West Monroe Partners upon several key principles, one of which is objectivity. We believe that to provide the right solution for a client’s needs, we need to offer an unbiased viewpoint. That means coming to the table without any preconceived solutions, canned approaches, or products to sell. So while our alliances enable us to implement with expertise and efficiency, we put these relationships to work when it makes sense for the client and for no other reason.

In those cases where an alliance partner’s standard business practice is to offer compensation or referral fees, we apply the compensation in one of three ways:

1. As a pass-through credit or discount on professional fees paid by the client
2. Toward the purchase of licenses
3. Toward training of our consultants

In instances where compensation from our alliances is not monetary but in the form of training, licenses, etc., we explicitly communicate this compensation to our clients.

Alliances with high quality organizations are, without question, an important part of what we offer. But we want it to be perfectly clear that when we involve an alliance partner as part of a project, we are doing so because it benefits your business, not our bottom line. This policy is part of our commitment to creating a solution that is 100-percent aligned with your goals.