Five Essentials for Successful Network & Telecoms Procurement
For more than 20 years, TNC has been at the forefront of helping organisations navigate the fast-moving world of network and telecoms procurement. Across hundreds of engagements, one truth has become clear: organisations that mess up their procurement reap months and sometimes years of pain.
Sadly, many organisations still fall into avoidable traps: rushing processes, engaging the wrong suppliers, or failing to bring the right stakeholders on the journey. The result? Delays, bad supplier choices, poor technical and operational solutions, weak SLAs, paying over the odds, and sometimes all of the above.
In this article, we walk through the five essential factors that consistently underpin successful network and telecoms procurement using insights drawn from hundreds of real projects at the cutting edge of network, telecoms, and mobile technology.
1. Set the Vision: Requirements & Strategic Planning
Put simply, defining and gaining broad agreement on a clear set of requirements is the single most important step you can take to ensure your procurement process is successful.
Amazingly though, many, many organisations either miss this step altogether, or only define either technical or commercial requirements.
Either way, the result is the same – delays caused by needing to do the hard yards of requirements definition later on, the need to restart or rerun key process steps, and often the horrible dawning realisation that you’ve engaged with the wrong suppliers, or have scoped the wrong services.
Of course, in extreme cases, this realisation doesn’t dawn until after contracts have been signed, when resolution is almost impossible.
How can you avoid these issues? TNC recommends the following key steps to success:
- Set aside sufficient time
Requirements development will typically take 3 months to complete properly - Engage a broad range of stakeholders
Too often, organisations think they have developed their requirements, but they have only addressed their technical needs (or even a subset of technical needs), which most often happens when only the technical teams have been involved. It is vital to include a wider group of stakeholders – operations, security, finance and procurement will all ultimately have to approve any new solution so the sooner their voices are heard, and their requirements captured, the better - Define requirements at the right level
There’s a fine line when defining requirements between being too high level and generic, which makes it hard to really identify which solutions best fit your needs, and being too specific and low level, which can easily either restrict which suppliers can bid, and being too prescriptive about their solutions
2. Curate the Market: Bidder Selection & Engagement
Ensuring you engage with right bidders from the start of your process is essential. Again, this is in part driven by understanding requirements and particularly if there are red lines and/or “cultural fit” requirements – specifically one of the common requirements is the size of the potential supplier in relation to the buying organisation. In TNC’s experience, many organisations want to ensure they are of significant size to be material to their suppliers but not too big such that a supplier struggles to service them.
A key issue here is that many organisations often don’t fully understand the market – relying instead on traditional or historic knowledge that may be out of date, or only engaging those bidders that have been proactive in engaging with them. The result is that organisations may not engage with the most capable or appropriate bidders that could best meet their requirements. Having intimate knowledge of the market is vital to inviting the right bidders into a process.
The next step after identification is ensuring your bidders are bought into your process. Service providers invest considerable time and money in taking part in a bid process and therefore are increasingly carefully considering how they deploy their finite resources. Bidders will want to ensure that they have a good chance of winning a process and that they are not just “making up the numbers”.
Buyers therefore need to ensure that they engage potential bidders early enough to build up some level of relationship, and to have time to invest with each bidder. Many bidders want to have lots of pre-engagement and to have time with different parts of an organisation (including execs) prior to any procurement process but unfortunately it is very rare that buying organisations have the time to do this across multiple suppliers. For this reason with the private sector TNC often recommends limiting the number of suppliers invited to between 4 and 6 (dependent on circumstances and service(s) being procured). Of course, the public sector does not have this luxury and must abide by strict regulations with regards to fair and open competition. As such there needs to be a balance struck and, like with requirements development, the time invested at the beginning often pays dividends in ensuring all the bidders that the organisations want to take part in the procurement process choose to do so and choose to do so in a meaningful way (again, the more complex the requirement/service, the more important this bidder engagement becomes.)
In reality, limited or zero engagement with potential bidders prior to the process leads to either low quality bids or even no-bids. Remember – bidders are always balancing finite resources, and they will prioritise those opportunities that they feel they have the best chance of winning.
3. Govern with Purpose: Governance as a Competitive Advantage
Governance is often considered the most boring and time-wasting activity in any project, and that’s no different in your procurement processes. However, the reality is that it is essential for the efficiency of a process and to ensure full and timely engagement.
In TNC’s experience, one of the key markers in any failing procurement process is a lack of effective governance, and particularly a lack of engagement from more senior stakeholders. Tying this back to requirements development, engaging with a broad range of stakeholders from the start, and keeping that coalition engaged through effective governance is critical to getting to the right decision in a timely manner.
4. Lead from the Top: Executive Engagement
Procurement succeeds when senior leaders are actively engaged, and effective executive sponsorship ensures alignment on strategic priorities, enhances bidders’ confidence in the process, and helps avoid late-stage surprises or vetoes.
At the outset it is essential that executive input to the strategy/requirements gathering is included. Everyone wants to avoid the pain of finding out at the latter stages of a process that the executive’s requirements are not being met (particularly likely if they weren’t known) or that they wish to veto a particular supplier.
Executive engagement throughout the process can also ensure everyone is focussed on the process and in addition executive involvement with bidders will ensure their focus too. As the process develops this can also be extended into peer-to-peer engagement with leading bidders both oiling the wheels for final supplier selection and negotiation and also ensuring a good relationship has been formed prior to deployment and service commencement.
5. Budget with Clarity: Know Your Number
Never ignore the budget! It may sound crazy, but TNC is amazed how many organisations are procuring services with no real idea of their current cost baseline, let alone their future budget. You wouldn’t buy a sofa that way and buying a Wide Area Network is no different!
Knowing what the budget is, and constantly reviewing the requirements and services against that budget is absolutely imperative to a successful process. It is easy to get carried away when assessing the services on offer only to be restricted later on by finding out that what the team are hoping to buy can’t be afforded. Indeed, this is often exacerbated by a lack of executive engagement as per Key Factor 4 above.
This ignorance or neglect of the budget means that the buying team then must scale back and right-size their requirements – at best this is time consuming but at worse it may mean the process needs to be rerun or that the best supplier was not considered or previously eliminated.
How TNC Helps Organisations Win
TNC’s extensive market insight and hands-on experience helps customers achieve optimal procurement outcomes. Whether providing expert advisory, augmenting internal teams, or running end-to-end procurement programmes, TNC can ensure you move forward with clarity, confidence, and control.