A GOOD WAY TO START BUILDING a stronger channel system is with a quick checkup. What's the health of the system today? What kind of job does each company in the system feel its channel partners are doing, how do partners rate the company's effort, and how to does the company score itself? Not only does taking a baseline reading give everyone a rough sense of what's going well and what isn't, it also gets people in gear for thinking together about channel issues - which is the first step towards building trust at the executive level and, ultimately, transparency between companies up and down the channel.

ACS RELIES ON SIMPLE SURVEYS and related analytical instruments that yield clear pictures, confident decisions and committed actions. Samples are broadly representative of each organization's functions and staff, to enable periodic survey repetition and development of a reliable longitutinal portrait of changes in value chain health. A sample portion of one analytic is shown above. Ideally, initial results are discussed face to face by executives from across the channel system in the "safe zone" of an ACS Workshop.