Cloud migration saves money for health insurer

A $23 billion-dollar global biopharmaceutical company with a highly mobile workforce tasked their internal IT team with optimizing their costs, agreements, and processes.

The client provides over 13,500 mobile devices to their worldwide employee base. These devices are provisioned on a variety of rate plans across multiple providers, resulting in a complex environment that is difficult to track and manage. The dynamic, global nature of their workforce puts further strain on both their Telecom Expense Management (“TEM”) provider and internal IT resources.

Once engaged, the CANDID chosen team found several opportunities for savings, credits, and process improvements:

Plan Consolidation and Pooling
After detailed analysis, our team leveraged their aggregate carrier plan database to select plans that better fit usage patterns and enabled minutes to be shared across any device throughout the environment. This tactic ensured that both unused capacity and costly overage charges were minimized. During the initial 3 months of management, our team performed over 30,000 rate and feature changes across 13,500 lines to deliver maximum savings.

International Plan Monitoring
Almost half of the client’s users regularly travel abroad, which necessitated the IT staff to manually enable and then disable, international calling and features for each line. This process was inefficient and time-consuming. Leveraging a direct feed from the client’s Concur travel system, our team automated the process and submitted the appropriate change orders directly to carriers based on the user’s online itinerary. This required no manual intervention from the client and ensured that they only paid for these capabilities when they were needed.

Policy Review and Revisions
A third of the client’s users had corporate tablets or data cards in addition to smartphones. After determining that most of the usage, especially international, was incurred by just smartphones, our team recommended a policy change reducing the provisioning scope for International features to smartphones only. The elimination of these expensive international features saved an average of $30 per device.

Device Procurement and Reduction
The client procured all devices on behalf of employees and allowed them to upgrade every 24 months. Our team recommended increasing the upgrade eligibility time-frame to 36 months, to be more in-line with industry best practices. Once this change was implemented the number of new devices procured dropped by almost a third and the overall equipment costs were reduced by $50k per month.

Carrier Renegotiation
When their provider agreements were up for renewal, CANDID utilized industry knowledge and familiarity with competitive offerings to negotiate reduced rate plans, equipment discounts, and early termination waivers. One agreement included free iPhones, which lowered their overall device procurement costs by over 50%.

User Behavior Modification
A user awareness program was implemented to proactively inform all employees via email of their monthly mobile spend and discourage excessive non-business use of all devices. When this initiative launched 156 lines had monthly spend of over $500. After two months, only 30 lines remained above that threshold, and the overall savings was more than 80%.

Portal-based Visibility and Reporting
The CANDID partner portal has provided the client the visibility and control of their environment that they had been lacking. The portal functionality not only saved the client significant internal manpower hours, it allowed them to cancel their contract with the TEM provider, eliminating a significant monthly expense.

Auditing
Proactive invoice auditing ensures that the client is billed in accordance to the terms specified in their carrier agreements and that all submitted change orders were processed timely and correctly. Detected errors automatically trigger the submission of a change order and a credit request to the carrier, which remains open until corrected. This process guaranteed that all carrier errors that were not in favor of the client were corrected and appropriate credits applied to their next monthly invoice.

This client’s goals were to lower mobility costs by 15% while gaining visibility and control of their mobile environment. In the first four months of the engagement, despite the client’s line count increasing by 10%, our client achieved savings of over 40%, equating to almost $6 million dollars in year one.

The initiatives implemented reduced international costs by almost 60%, cut the average device procurement cost in half and moved time-consuming carrier change management tasks away from the client’s internal IT team. More favorable carrier agreements were negotiated on the client’s behalf, and a plan was implemented to enforce corporate mobility policies and guidelines. The client now relies on their custom Mobility portal for cost reporting and inventory management across all carriers, and have plans to utilize it for employee device procurement.

Prior to engaging with CANDID, the client was over their
IT budget by 9%. Four months later they were 37% under budget.