Driving Business Value through Telecom Expense Management

The Challenge

As a curator of design, taste, and style in the luxury lifestyle market, this luxury retailer experienced sensational growth over the past few years becoming a leader in the industry. With a centralized decision-making business model and a distributed geographic outreach, their AP team was struggling to pay all telecom bills for stores located throughout the US and Canada. In particular, they grappled with:

• Multiple vendors with different invoice formats, billing cycles, and support processes
• Inventory management – not knowing which services they had at which locations
• Understanding spend by location and by vendor
• Contract management – when contracts expire, which contracts could be renegotiated, and were they getting the best pricing

These issues, coupled with a lack of oversight and manual processes led them to reach out to Vatic for help.

The Solution

Vatic implemented its Telecom Expense Management (TEM) solution powered by Tangoe© to completely offload the responsibility of telecom invoice management from their AP team. The Tangoe© platform is open architecture and seamlessly integrates with any AP system. By streamlining and automating the receipt of all telecom invoices into the software, Vatic was immediately able to audit and itemize inventory by location and vendor and make sure services were billing correctly. Vatic also implemented bill pay process which relinquished the hassle of this client paying multiple vendors each month down to one funded ACH account.

The Results

The Vatic TEM solution provided our client with a centralized one-stop shop for all the telecom management needs. Invoice auditing and reporting highlighted closed locations and unused services that they were not aware they were still paying for. This insight allowed our customer to take immediate action, and with Vatic’s help, immediately canceled these services resulting in over $75K in annual savings. The automated bill pay process virtually eliminated late fees that had previously been in excess of $1800 annually. Vatic also provides monthly spend trend reporting by vendor and location and highlights any anomalies within the data. They also provide a monthly inventory of all services by location and vendor. This holistic view of their telecom architecture provided our client the comparative information they need to make cost conscious business decisions when new stores are added or when services are turned down.