SOURCING & PROCUREMENT SERVICES
SOURCING ADVISORY SERVICE
General buyer is very rarely expert in ICT environment, with limited experience and knowledge of this area. ICT sourcing requires non-traditional sourcing thinking and most important is to understand the ICT market in large scale with all consequenses to be able to balance suppliers’ professional sales teams. Few have the time, experience and resources to develop best practices to effectively manage deal engagements in this segment.
We work directly with clients throughout the deal cycle to build leverage and control spending in all major IT categories. As importantly, our Analyst Team inspects large amount of individual client deals against similar deals across our client network to reveal pricing gaps and savings opportunities.
SOURCING STRATEGY & PLAN
We provide leadership in enterprise software, hardware and services deal set-up, team alignment, communication, and strategy, supported by real-time market intelligence and transaction analysis.
The Sourcing Strategy & Plan program creates a strategy level documentation including definitions of WHO (what suppliers), HOW (how to approach them, leverage them) and WHEN (timeline). The plan includes all key decision factors as connection with budget, business case definitions and other relevant inputs which are usually tailor-made to specific customer.
Unlike large consulting firms, Smart Cost Consulting brings a light touch, high impact approach to clients. We dispatch small teams of subject matter experts to quickly assess and execute client programs with an eye towards minimizing disruption and financial risk.
MAINTENANCE OPTIMIZATION & COST REDUCTION
Recurring maintenance fees (support services) provide the single most profitable revenue stream for large IT suppliers. Many clients view this spend as inevitable and non-negotiable, though it is neither. This is both relevant, either to SW or HW. In our long and large experience 8 from 10 maintenance cases is possible to optimize and in the best cases reduce on the cost significantly. We always consider Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Net Present Value (NPV) to find the right direction in your budget and focus on preferable part as CAPEX or OPEX.
CLOUD COST & COMPLIANCE ASSESSMENT
In last couple of years, the development of Public or Private cloud computing is significantly growing in all ICT segments and across all business industries. There can be different drivers to consider the converting your ICT into cloud provisioning (either partially or entirely). We have experience in calculating different business cases with different scenarios and purposes. We know the cost doesn’t have to be always the primary driver, and it’s important to consider other drivers as well (e.g. lack of internal qualified IT experts in specific areas, operation quality, SLAs required by your customers or consumers).
Particularly start-up companies can benefit from Cloud Computing Services, since frequently they do not operate an internal IT infrastructure. In this program we create Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) approach for Cloud Computing Services. Benefits management in Cloud Computing is another new research field that can for instance be explored by means of cost-benefit analyses.
