White Paper: How TNC helped a large organisation save 30% on it's mobile bill

Project:

One of the UK’s largest companies was approaching the end of its contract with its mobile telephony vendor. The estate included 3,000 handsets with a mix of different types of users (smartphone, data, voice) and a mix of domestic and roaming requirements.

Customer Objectives:

Given the continual cost pressures, the customer needed to secure substantial cost savings without compromising anything in terms of quality and usability:

• Deliver good quality devices and service to their users
  
• Secure good account management and accurate billing
  
• Future-proofed technology
  
• Avoid bill shock
  

TNC delivered a 3-step solution to achieving all the customer’s objectives:

1.Demand Management

Large organisations will often grudgingly acknowledge they don’t do enough to manage their mobile estates. Very often this means loose eligibility criteria, lack of a stringent leavers’ process etc., all of which tends to mean most organisations are paying for more mobile connections than they really need.

For these reasons, TNC believes it is essential that the first step of any successful mobile procurement process is to complete a detailed analysis of the current estate to identify the customer’s real mobile needs e.g. how many handsets do they need across the company? Are all billed-for handsets being used, or are they sitting in a drawer? Have company leavers returned their phones?

There are many instances when previous employees have left the company years before but their phones are still being paid for, or even used, and therefore bills being paid unnecessarily. TNC’s analysis resulted in a clear breakdown of demand, enabling the customer to reduce its baseline by nearly 10%.

2. Smart Procurement

TNC developed a best-fit commercial model for the customer and managed a competitive tender process to drive the best possible results.

• Tariff or bundles?

• Tech fund
  

Choosing the bundle option enabled TNC to maximise the value of the tech fund, as well as secure a significant percentage of this fund as an airtime credit.

• Roaming data
  

This is often the most complex area of any mobile deal. Many organisations find they have ended up with an ill-fitting deal with huge potential for unwittingly overspending on roamed data. Again, there are a huge number of approaches to securing the best-fit roamed data deal but TNC’s vendor and solution independence meant we have the flexibility to identify and secure the best fit solution for each customer. In this case, we recommended a pooled solution which allowed the data used when abroad to be shared between all the customer’s users, making bill shock again much less likely due to the big cushion of the shared data.

3. On-going optimisation

It is widely known in the industry that on average 10 -12% of the value of phone bills are wrong. This is especially an issue for large organisations with thousands of users and very complex billing. In addition to being badly billed by vendors, many organisations do not take care to manage their mobile billing as its time consuming, complex and requires an ongoing commitment of resources.

Partnering with the customer on this on-going optimisation of the mobile estate billing, TNC saved them time and money as all over payments were corrected.

This company saved over 30% on its mobile costs thanks to employing TNC’s services, whilst securing all their technical, operational and contractual objectives.

Could this be achieved without the support, guidance and management from TNC?

Most likely not, due to these 3 essential ingredients:

1. IT and Procurement leaders in large organisations are very busy with full schedules, therefore are unlikely to have the time or resources to research the ever changing mobile industry. Whereas TNC consultants are experts in this field and are immersed in it on a daily basis. TNC’s knowledge facilitated the construction of a best-fit commercial model, to suit the customer, resulting in the best price for the contract as well as avoiding bill shock.
   
2. Similarly, it is a huge time commitment for the IT and Procurement leaders to dedicate to the analysis, tender and optimisation process, on top of their already full schedules. TNC’s consultants had the experience and time available to ensure a clear, good contract decision.
   
3. TNC’s unique position as a vendor independent consultancy, means it has detailed knowledge of industry pricing benchmarks, which aren’t publicly available, and leveraged these to drive costs down for the customer.
   

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