The Client

A Fortune® 200 service company with over 2,000 locations nationwide and a monthly telecom spend of $1.6 million. This company faced a $1 million contractual shortfall penalty from AT&T however; this was resolved by our subject matter experts.

The Challenges

This client’s previous Telecom Expense Management (TEM) provider did not have an accurate inventory of services, carrier’s, or accounts forcing the client to rely on the TEM provider to forward all invoices for payment. Invoice forwarding was not timely and as a result, the client received more than fifty disconnect notices and ten to fifteen sites disconnected daily. Most of their locations are in remote areas which require small Telco’s that are not capable of online billing and have shorter pay cycles, making timely delivery of invoices further complicated. Another challenge we had with this client was their decentralized help desk environment. The location managers were able to facilitate their own Moves, Adds, Changes, and Disconnects (MACD’s) and often were not aware that the new services were created on a new account. This resulted in over three hundred providers and 17,000+ invoices. This client grows naturally by acquisition and due to their size they are forced by regulation to divest business units as they acquire new ones. As a result of this type of growth and the decentralized environment, we found that they were still spending over $1 million on telecom services for divested business units annually.

Goals & Objectives

1. Inventory their carriers and accounts for invoice tracking monthly to eliminate disconnection of services.

2. Build an inventory to include all services. (Local, LD, Data, Conferencing, Wireless)

3. Reduce the number of providers by consolidating existing services with Local aggregators.

4. Reduce invoice count by consolidating existing individual invoices by site location and centralizing the order process by implementing a MACD help-desk .

5. Implement a process to properly divest a site upon sale of the business to ensure the client doesn’t continue paying for these services.

Results

1. Disconnect notices were reduced to less than two per month with a prioritization system that eliminates site disconnections due to non-payment.

2. Inventory was completed and resulted in the disconnection of duplicate DSL circuits and telephone numbers no longer in use. Savings of $15k+ monthly.

3. Sourced and implemented an aggregator to reduce the number of providers by 20%. Savings of $45k+ monthly.

4. Reduced invoice count from 17k to 6k by implementing a MACD help desk that integrated with clients ticket system.

5. The divestiture process defined ensures all telecom invoices related to the divested business are transferred to the new owner within less than two billing cycles. Saved client over $1M by transferring all telecom invoices to the new owners on sites that were sold as late as ten years earlier.