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Amid inflationary pressures, supply chain disruption, and geopolitical uncertainty fueling risk, cost management is more important than ever… especially in IT. 

 

What is cost management? Cost management is often defined as the process of planning, budgeting, and reporting project spend in order to keep teams on budget and control overall costs. It typically focuses on generating savings and maximizing profits in the longer term

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From our perspective, cost management encompasses more than budgeting, cost control, and savings capture. While cost management initiatives start with a holistic, detailed picture of assets and spend, they fall short when lacking assessments on how the more strategic, costly solutions map to the company KPI’s, as well as what is currently available in the marketplace. 

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In these uncertain times, CXO’s have an opportunity to drive new, data-driven approaches to cost management to build resilience heading into 2024 and beyond. That is exactly where we come in.

Following are proven methodologies to help identify and fully capture cost management opportunities across your technology service stack:

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1. Capture visibility. Start with a comprehensive cost analysis to benchmark existing spend by vendor and solution. Organizations need a detailed picture of their services, vendors, pricing, and terms so they have full visibility into their infrastructure, and how that infrastructure maps to what is currently available in the marketplace. Leveraging a technology audit and visibility tool to provide detailed, actionable data can expedite this process, as well as offer on-going expense management solutions to support the business moving forward. These tools can be obtained through a strategic partner at little to no cost to the business. 

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2. Identify opportunities. Quickly identify areas for optimization based on the current vendor, market and competitive landscape. Enlist expert support from a firm who has real-time knowledge of the marketplace, as well as a broad range of technology expertise. With thousands of vendors and solutions in the market today, the right partner can bridge the time to value gap by quickly providing technology, solution and TCO/ROI expertise.

 

3. Establish clear goals and objectives. Business first, technology second. What are the business goals and vision? What is the role of IT in delivering on those goals? What are our compliance and governance considerations and requirements? How do these solutions and strategies map to our near-, mid- and long-term goals? How will we define success and measure ROI?

 

4. Start with the low hanging fruit. Quick wins provide an easy way for CXOs to move from speculating what savings could be, to demonstrating a foundation of actual savings results. This helps to ensure buy-in as the team moves onto larger optimization projects. 

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5. Establish a clear roadmap for other areas of optimization. Your roadmap should go beyond quick wins that modestly reduce costs into identifying the more strategic levers such as CX, cloud, BPO, and security through rapid assessments to identify opportunities. Rapid assessments should provide high quality output, at a low cost, with minimal resource investment to reduce strain. These are often one-day workshops that will not only reveal opportunities, but also provide actionable data with a proven methodology to ensure transformation and value capture. The right partner will not only be able to deliver on assessments, but also provide transition management via PMP certified project managers to allow the enterprise to focus on other business driving priorities. This enables the business to not only off-load the heavy lifting of implementation, but also accurately factor transition costs into TCO and ROI.

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6. Map results to business outcomes, measure success and ROI. Circling back post project completion to measure success through business impact helps CXO's justify investments and clearly communicate results across the business. This should include hard investment benefits that are measurable, as well as intangible benefits such as increased efficiency, reduction in resource strain, improved CX and increased productivity, to name a few. 

 

t2BEXPERTS, powered by BridgePointe Technologies can expedite every step of this process and ensure optimum outcomes across network, CX, cloud, cyber security, BPO, IoT, mobility, managed services, and total lifecycle and expense management. As a vendor agnostic, unbiased technology advisory firm, we support some of the most admired brands by bridging the time to value gap between technology decision making and business results. 

 

By leveraging our proven, data driven process, real-time knowledge of the marketplace, unrivaled insider insight, and industry leading solution architects, we will quickly give you the visibility you need, identify the technology optimization levers you can pull, and deliver a clear roadmap to ROI that will drive real value impact across the entire organization.

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