Leading Telecom Company: Ringing up real savings: ICG Commerce delivers clear value for telecommunications company

Situation:

Faced with shrinking margins due to increased competition, a $7B telecommunications company needed to realize significant cost reductions quickly. Achieving reductions was hampered by lack of a standardized procurement process for indirect goods, plus a cumbersome supply base as the result of many mergers and acquisitions. Along with reducing costs, the company needed to streamline its supply base, gain greater visibility into corporate-wide expenditures, and improve the purchasing processes with automation tools.

Solution:

To help the telecom company identify savings opportunities, ICG Commerce conducted a detailed assessment of the company's expenditures and developed a tailored savings strategy to help the company meet its goals. ICG Commerce strategically sourced a number of purchasing categories and used multi-company demand aggregation to bundle the purchasing volume of several companies to negotiate optimal price and service agreements with world-class suppliers. To help the company realize the negotiated savings and gain process efficiencies, ICG Commerce implemented a complete purchase-to-pay transaction management solution that automated administrative purchasing tasks. At the same time, ICG Commerce integrated the purchasing technology with the company's enterprise-wide financial system to help automate Accounts Payable (AP) processes. In addition, ICG Commerce experts led a comprehensive change management initiative to drive end user compliance including executive communications and sponsorship, live classes, and self-study and web-based training.

Results:

Within 90 days, the telecom company realized cost reductions and hard-dollar savings of 15% on a large portion of their indirect purchases. Compliance rates were greater than 85% company-wide, and ICG Commerce helped the company reduce their supply base by more than 1,000 vendors. Significant AP efficiencies and workload reductions were achieved with consolidated eInvoicing and automation of over 4,500 invoices per month.