$9.1M+
Annual Technology Savings
$90M+
Total Savings
Case Study
International technology provider optimizes inventory costs and leverages detailed inventory information to deploy leading edge technology.
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Results
The customer has achieved in excess of $90M in audit savings over the last 5 years.
Objective
This global IT firm needed ways to drive costs down for their internal network environment and their customer network environment.
Additionally, they wanted a global view of their network services inventory to plan and implement technology changes. Savings achieved form audit activities were targeted to fund technology changes.
Fast facts
Number of Accounts
410,000
Number of Services
$9,100,000
Annual Technology Savings
$90,000,000+
Total Savings
At a glance
Sakon provides a leading cloud-based connectivity spend management and mobile operations platform. The purpose-built platform connects organization with suppliers globally, provides visibility into and control over how companies spend on communications services and enables businesses to achieve significant savings. The company markets its platform to a range of enterprises in various industries, such as healthcare and pharmaceuticals, retail, financial services, manufacturing, technology, and others through a direct sales force as well as partnerships with leading systems integrators, technology alliance partners and communications service providers. The company was founded in 2003, has over 650 employees with offices in US, Canada, UK, India and is headquartered in Concord, Massachusetts.
About Sakon
The customer needed a global view of their services and costs at the service level in order to achieve their objectives:
Business Challenge
The customer is achieving additional savings as new technology is rolled out through elimination of older, more costly technology and implementation of new technology at reduced costs. Estimated savings are $4.4M per year.
The customer is obtaining additional savings through contract negotiation resulting from vendor consolidation and service pricing consistency. Savings are estimated to be approximately $3.2M per year.
Back to the top
13,000+
The Sakon solution was able to address all three business challenges.
By leveraging automation, the customer obtained a reliable approach to managing inventory in a constantly changing environment. Early identification of new and discontinued services provided a global view of the technical environment as changes occurred allowing technical teams to work with current data to support their network design and implementation.
Automated auditing allowed for quick identification of billing outside of contract pricing, double billing, identification of discontinued services still billing and orphan services, which are services not used, but not cancelled with the vendor.
Advanced, flexible reporting capabilities allow for accurate comparison of costs for similar services across geographies and vendors. This was combined with accurate inventory to leverage the customer’s RFP process and contract negotiations.
Solution
Accurate inventory
100%
The company gains exceptional financial and IT clarity, all charges are 100% allocated to the GL, and it also now precisely splits and accurately rebills all shared services to its own customers.
The company initially invested in a platform that promised all of these benefits but fell woefully short. They were unable to get accurate inventory data; for example, the system indicated that a 2 person office had 500 lines and while this was obviously wrong, there was no easy way to correct the situation! As a result, they were forced to implement manual management processes requiring 200+ mobile administrators for 24,000 lines. At the same time, they were unable to implement a review, audit and approval process for telecommunications ordering which further added to complexity and cost.
Network Environment: Needed to understand existing technology deployed in order to plan and implement new lower cost technologies. Detailed information by site for equipment and circuits as well as the interconnection between these services was not readily available.
Finance: Needed to improved billing accuracy to drive cost reduction.
Procurement: Needed to determine global spend with vendors and associated pricing by type of service across geographies to support negotiations of vendor contracts
