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This is an enhanced edition of the HBR reprint R0108E, originally published in September 2001. HBR OnPoint articles save you time by enhancing an original Harvard Business Review article with an overview that draws out the main points and an annotated bibliography that points you to related resources. This enables you to scan, absorb, and share the management insights with others. Most companies do a great job promoting efficiency within their own walls, streamlining internal processes wherever possible. But they have less success coordinating cross-company business interactions. When data pass between companies, inconsistencies, errors, and misunderstandings routinely arise, leading to wasted work. The costs of such inefficiencies are very real and very large. In this article, Michael Hammer outlines the activities and goals used in streamlining cross-company processes. He breaks down the approach into four stages: scoping - identifying the business process for redesign and selecting a partner; organizing - establishing a joint committee to oversee the redesign and convening a design team to implement it; redesigning - taking apart and reassembling the process, with performance goals in mind; and implementing - rolling out the new process and communicating it across the collaborating companies. Hammer says this new kind of collaboration promises to change the traditional vocabulary of corporate relationships. What if you and I sell different products to the same customer? We''re not competitors, but what are we? In the past, we didn''t care. Now, we should, the author says.