DALLAS--There may be no rest for competitively put-upon services providers, but Vertek Corporation would like its customers to rest assured that their partner relationships are in good shape. To that end, the business process outsourcing company released a new graphical user interface (GUI), among other enhancements, for its Vertek Partnership Assurance offering.

Vertek is all about assurance. It provides business assurance, financial assurance, and partnership assurance along with a network migration solution, complex order management and provisioning, contract management and process design and optimization. However, its focus this week is on partnership assurance.

“Each party wants to make revenue on their deals with partners, and that’s our starting point,” said Michael Haggerty, director of business assurance at Vertek.

The VPA program ensures that all partnerships perform at an optimum level operationally and financially. It is a hosted, managed service that includes professional services, analytical tools and best practice methodologies and operational model for managing all aspects of third-party partnership relationships.

“From a Sarbanes-Oxeley perspective, you really need solid, stable numbers on your relationships,” Haggerty said.

The GUI in the new release has aesthetic improvements that make it easier to navigate and easier on the eyes, but it also has better key performance reporting and analysis and access dashboards, charts, detailed reports and operational analytics.

“We redesigned the GUI for a more logical flow and access to information, so operations managers and finance managers can view the health of relationships in several areas,” Haggerty said.

Billing issues, subscriber analysis that looks at both sides of a relationship and fallout analysis--which investigates what issues are causing problems and what their financial impact is--are just three of the issues that can make or break a relationship. So can compatibility issues between partners’ internal systems and simple differences in interpretations of contract terms.

The VPA portal provides a consistent customer view between two or more partner companies. It objectively monitors revenue, costs, margins and the overall operational health of partnerships. The best practices methodologies also can be used to strengthen inter-company process management.

The product addresses three core areas: reporting and analysis, which results from the tracking and trending of invoice settlements, disputes and more; managing the monthly data receipt, normalization, analysis, and reporting updates and providing defined methodologies and procedures for new partner implementation and existing partnership maintenance.