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With the evolving dynamics due to COVID-19 and the impacts on ways of working; including remote working, adaptive connectivity, digital workplace and shared digital services, many organisations are in an ambiguous position with all the added costs to enable this. Here’s how the right cost optimisation solution can help optimise your ICT investments and build business efficiency.
COVID-19 has impacted many businesses in varying ways and forms and to different degrees. As soon as the lockdown was introduced, many businesses were muddled with ambiguity as to how to adapt to the change and some even had their IT team stretched to capacity to organise and work towards the new set up. Digital transformation was accelerated. It was new for some, whilst already a part of ‘ways of working’ for others, yet it was challenging for all.
Turn challenges into meaningful change:
It is relevant for an organisation to know what impact a transitional process has on the total investments of the organisation, the value it will bring to the business and how to keep track of it moving forward.
As a part of speeding up the digital transformation process, in March this year many businesses procured a number of new ICT services and assets, distributed them across locations to their employees, facilitated remote working and deployed unified communications for better connectivity and efficiency. Special mobile plans and data packs were required as everyone working from home needed to have more data and bandwidth to meet the growing demand. Some organisations were required to test their business continuity plan and migrate their contact centres on-shore due to shut downs across the globe.
While rapid change seems challenging at first, it can also be rewarding to adapt to the new ways in the long run. When such complexity grows, organisations need more visibility and end to end transparency, to avoid risk and ensure better control and governance. How do organisations avoid excess cost and IT spend blowing out of proportion? An obvious outcome of this, is to streamline and consolidate ICT investment overhead. This can be managed and controlled, with a well-designed, customised cost optimisation solution.
An end to end cost optimisation solution can help your business drive cost efficiencies, while maximising business value, through a business focused continuous effort that may include, consolidating data from various sources, obtaining the best pricing and terms for all business (ICT) purchases, standardising, simplifying and rationalising platforms, applications, processes and services.
Some key benefits of the solutions include:
- Better visibility and control through consolidation of hardware, software, cloud, devices, mobile, fixed and data costs, under one solution.
- Intelligent analytics through customised data reporting, that helps informed decision making.
- Transparency and visibility through spend drill-down to individual departments and employees.
- Track changes to your products and services.
- Flag exceptions related to contract management, redundant or cancelled services.
- Asset management and inventory tracking.
- Order tracking to the individual level.
So where do we start? Introducing Telstra Managed Cost Optimisation Services.
We offer services that help analyse your current expense environment to identify complexity, bottlenecks, non-value generating elements and process improvements. Our value-added services include a dedicated or premium consulting support, on-site support for customers requiring domain expertise and customised or bespoke billing formats and billing feeds.
The process:
We start with workshops identifying your business needs and challenges with respect to tracking and managing your ICT spend. An ideal scenario is when an organisations ICT product and services information is readily available. However, this isn’t always possible, so we will organise workshops and offer additional support to help build this database. Once the required information of product and services, invoices, assets, contracts and other data points are ready, we work on a technology design framework that matches the drivers you determine for success. During the initial deployment workshops, forms may be custom built and changed within an existing tool to match what you would like to see as an output. The data collated is then loaded onto a ‘platform’. This could be one that belongs to a best-in-class, globally recognised and Telstra approved third party provider, whom we will deploy to design the solution to meet your needs. A methodical process is followed through workshops to design a solution that serves your businesses cost optimisation goal. After initial setup and workshops, tests are run to validate this will work, before it can go live.
The outcome:
Ongoing cadence and governance are implemented through the lifecycle, establishing regular reporting which can be custom built, specific to each business. Most businesses are commonly seeking the following outcome from their expense management tool - downloading and importing invoices, invoice summary report and drill down, tracking and allocation by cost centre or hierarchy, setting up digital workflow for approvals and processing invoices, regular reporting and visibility on spend threshold, zero usage or redundant services reporting, data and SMS (excess) usage trends and flags, exceptions management, contract management and comparison, audits and optimisation plan. Regular lifecycle meetings are held to ensure that governance is maintained. Our external support team facilitate these cadence sessions for you. Discrepancies are flagged, audited and then analysed in detail along with our billing support team to come up with a remediation plan. In several cases, we can also conduct proactive bill checks and support business who need that kind of billing information. We offer one on one expert professional consultancy services that can assist with your organisations goal of rationalisation and standardisation of assets across the business. Regular on-boarding support and training is available as and when required.
The more complex a business structure or the ICT array of services, the more is the requirement for organisations to consolidate their investments under one single solution for added transparency and control over spend and thus optimise overall ICT cost, cut down on negative cost and ensure productive investments.
To learn more, visit our Telstra managed cost optimisation services webpage and see how we can help your business.
