In these challenging economic times, almost all organisations are under pressure to cut costs and to make their budgets go further.  With network and telecoms costs being some of the largest elements of the IT budget, they are typically, and rightly, one of the first places organisations look to drive these cost savings.   

Very often, the approach these organisations take is to focus on very strategic initiatives – technology transformation, solution consolidation, and migrating services to new suppliers.  These initiatives are great – in fact, we at TNC spend a huge amount of our lives supporting customers to execute exactly these types of projects. 

However, these initiatives can take a long time to bear fruit – it’s not unusual for a competitive tender process leading to a migration of services to take 2-3 years to deliver cost savings. 

Ironically though, the time and resources that get sucked into these huge, strategic programmes can mean that organisations very often overlook more tactical savings that can be delivered almost instantly. 

So, in this article, we switch our focus from the strategic to the tactical – what are these savings that almost every organisation could access quickly, and what should you be doing about it? 

Optimise Your Solutions 

Here at TNC, we review hundreds of customer solutions every year, and almost every one we review shows opportunities for optimisation.  One of the most common opportunities we identify is to bring volumes into alignment with reality, and this can play two ways: 

• Volumes Decreasing
  Whether its mobile fleets that grew during COVID, or telephony platforms with ever less usage as voice migrates to Teams, we are finding that the volumes of services actually in use are very often much lower than the volume anticipated in the contract.  That can often mean you are paying for services you aren’t using – could you cut the number of phones on desks, or the number of mobiles you provide?  The answer for many, many organisations is “yes” and the saving can be sizeable and immediate 

• Volumes Increasing
  By contrast, in many other areas, your volumes might be increasing.  This could be the number of Teams users, the amount of data your mobile users are consuming, or the number of agents in your contact centre.  In the same way that lower volumes can create savings by not paying for services you aren’t using, higher volumes can give you the opportunity to drive savings by renegotiating contracts with your suppliers – if you are spending more, chances are that there are additional discounts to be had.  Again, the saving can be sizeable, and very quick to achieve
   

Cleanse Your Estates 

We’ve been saying it for 20 years, and it remains true – most bills are inaccurate, and almost always it’s you that is overpaying.  Why?  Telecoms billing systems are often inflexible, which can be compounded over through mergers and acquisitions – in a world that is very dynamic with sites and connections coming and going or changing, this inflexibility often leads to manual amendments and that is where error can creep in.  Furthermore, estates are large and dynamic, bills are complex and hard to unpick, and most service providers have rooms full of people whose job is to make sure they bill you every penny they can.  However, most organisations receiving those bills don’t have rooms full of people checking the bills are right, hence the overpayment. 

Now, cleansing every inaccurate item off your bill is a lot of work – we know, it’s something we do every day for our customers!  However, if time is short, you could reach for the lowest hanging fruit, which is typically: 

• Mobile Zero Billers
  8-10% of the connections in the average mobile bill that TNC interrogates have been zero billing for at least six months e.g. you are paying for the connection but the user hasn’t consumed any voice or data for half a year or more.  This almost certainly means they’ve left the organisation and their old phone is sat in a drawer, or they don’t need a phone.  Either way, you can probably cut your mobile bill by 5% or even higher just by ceasing these connections – immediatel

• Mobile Data Abuse
  Almost every mobile bill that TNC reviews shows some users consuming huge amounts of data every month – when corporate usage is still averaging less than 3GB per user per month, these people are consuming 10GB, 20GB, 30GB, 40GB, 50GB or even more.  Whilst the data pools in many mobile deals mean those users aren’t attracting a specific charge, it very oftens means that the size of data pools, and therefore the cost of data pools, is being set to accommodate this sort of abuse.  If you can reduce your data usage by 10-20%, which is often the volume abuse generates, you can buy less data and your costs will fal

• Clear Your Leavers
  Almost all mobile bills includes payments for connections being used by people who have left the organisation and taken their phone with them.  Fixing this can be simple – get a list of leavers and cross-reference it against the people on the mobile bill, but it’s amazing how many organisations either don’t do this, or don’t do it sufficiently often, meaning they are spending money unnecessarily
   

Look in Unfashionable Places 

As TNC, we are often amazed by the contracts we find when we do discovery on a new customer’s estate.  In addition to finding contracts no-one seemed to know about, one of the things we find a lot are what might be called “unfashionable contracts” – niche solutions, often provided by niche suppliers, for services that are a long way down anyone’s list of sexy tech, and that just seem to have fallen down the back of the sofa.  However, often the spend on these services can be considerable. 

Examples of these sorts of “unfashionable contracts” include such glamorous solutions as inbound voice, call recording, bulk SMS, and many others. 

Very often, when we discover these sorts of contracts, they haven’t been re-tendered in years, and often haven’t even been renegotiated in years.  Furthermore, almost every one of the dangers we mention above – volumes no longer aligned to reality, abuse or unclean invoicing etc. – are all present, meaning these contracts can be great places to deliver quick cost savings.  Sometimes, the service can be ceased altogether, or the service could be taken over by a strategic supplier driving cost savings.  Even if all that happens is the existing supplier delivers better pricing, it’s a quick and potentially valuable win.  

Switch Off Everything You Can 

Of course, we aren’t advocating that you switch off services you are still using!  But what we are saying is that you should turn everything else off.  One of the biggest lessons we’ve learned over the last 20 years is how reluctant most organisations are to turning services off, and this can mean big things – we’ve found the old voice platform still on the bills alongside the new platform because no-one turned it off, and we’ve certainly found thousands of lines connected to buildings that are closed, servicing contracts that were lost, or connecting platforms that are no longer in use. 

By way of example, with the analogue switch-off coming up, we’ve been leading lots of programmes to discover our customers’ analogue services and develop plans to replace them.  On average, 40% of the services we find during those audits are no longer required.  That’s a really big cost saving, and you don’t have to wait for analogue switch-off to have it. 

Best of all, almost certainly these old services are on aged, rolling contracts, so you can cease most of what you find, meaning you gain the savings almost immediately. 

Don’t Forget The New Things 

Much of what we’ve talked about so far are “old” things – services that have been deployed for years and need to be optimised.  However, there can be similar sized opportunities with “new” things, particularly cloud applications, cloud platforms, cloud telephony, cloud contact centre etc. 

The costs for almost all these services are based on number and type of licences, and if you have too many licences, or the wrong type of licences, you will be paying too much for these services. 

Very often, when they are rolled out, estimates (or guesses) are made about the volumes of licences that will be required, and the reality tends to be different.  Here at TNC, we’ve started to find that there can be huge savings to be made following up behind these programmes to cleanse and optimise the licence estate – right-sizing volumes, aligning licence types to usage requirements etc. Through our FinOps process we have also begun to see the huge potential in cloud over-spend particularly on inefficient design for BAU use and the continued payments for  stranded/unused items, there really is a lack of ongoing maintenance leading to significant unnecessary overspend.  

Again, these processes can be done in a matter of weeks and the savings can land immediately. 

Conclusions 

With almost every organisation looking hard to find cost savings, it can be easy to focus on the big, strategic programmes to deliver these savings.  The challenge is that these programmes can take many months, and often many years, to deliver these savings.  TNC therefore strongly recommends that all organisations also look at the tactical savings that can deliver results quickly, and often without the cost, risk, and disruption of rolling out new services. 

The key to achieving these immediate savings is to look hard into the contract landscape, turn over those stones that perhaps haven’t been turned over for a long time, seek ways to optimise existing solutions and contracts, and drive the best behaviours from your suppliers. 

How Can TNC Help? 

TNC is the UK’s largest independent network and telecoms consultancy, entirely focused on supporting over 300 of the UK’s largest and most demanding organisations to secure the best possible outcomes from all aspects of their WAN, LAN, telephony, contact centre, mobility, and cloud services. 

We’ve spent the last 20 years developing market-leading strategies to help your organisation optimise every aspect of your network and telecoms services – from strategy development and solution procurement, to deployment and long-term management and optimisation of your solutions. 

If you are seeking cost savings on your network and telecoms expenditure, you really should get in contact with us. 

TNC holds over 4.3m active market data points covering WAN, data networks, fixed voice and mobility

More

Insight, blogs and white papers