A 3-Step Process to Reduce Your IT Spend 25% Or More

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​In the latest meeting with your company’s executives, the ultimate goal was the same as ever - increase revenue, decrease spend. 

Do more, with less.

​​Your directive is to find a 10% cost savings in the next year and you are looking for some quick, streamlined ways to achieve that goal.

Have you taken a good look at your current contract situation? Where can you find savings in the software and products you’re already paying for?

​In this article, I’m going to share how you can create a system to manage and optimize your current (and future) IT contracts. By taking these steps, you'll achieve the best cost savings (often upwards of 25%) for your company.
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​How do you manage & optimize your current IT contracts?

To optimize your IT spending, you need to get organized. Tons of contracts are flying around and you have to know where you’re starting from today to be able to optimize for the future.

You have multiple contracts with each supplier you work with. Each product you buy from them throughout the year has its own legal commitments: Master Service Agreements (MSA), Statements of Work (SOW), order forms, etc. 

Each supplier has a number of IT contracts they use with their clients.

Any of these types of contractual documents probably have different commercial language. 

And they all add up to time and money obligations for you.

The worst part? Almost none of these contracts will be co-termed. Regardless of the company they’re with, each contract will have a different term period. Some of them will be for six months, a year, eighteen months, what have you.

This creates mass chaos and it’s all by design.

In order to get out of that chaos, you need to get above it - get a bird’s eye view of the landscape of your IT contracts. This can be a very arduous process but the payoff is huge. Take the time to align each of the contracts so you can properly optimize around them.

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Step 1: Create an Asset Inventory List

If you don’t have a contract management system - and most companies don’t, even the biggest ones out there - you need to create an Asset Inventory List.

Basically, list out all your suppliers and all the IT contracts. You need to be clear on what contracts you have with a specific supplier. 

You can do this with a fancy Excel spreadsheet like the one I’ve created below. You can download this template for your own use.

​Essentially, this list will have the vendor name, contract type, contract term, and price. Consultant groups charge millions for this fancy spreadsheet but you can create one yourself from my free template.

Through this process, you’ll identify 2 things:

1. How much you’re spending every year.
   
2. How many IT contracts you have with each supplier.

With this information, you can tackle the next step. You now know what contracts are coming up for renewal and when. You know the negotiation period and can bring in extra help in advance to work through that process. And finally, you can now work on co-terming all the order forms and SOWs.

These adjustments create more administrative ease versus the chaotic burden they’re designed to be.

Once you’ve got a survey on your IT contract landscape, you can move on to Step 2.

Step 2: Analyze Each Supplier Against a Right Size/Right Price Matrix

Start with the suppliers that are your biggest spend items. These will most likely be your ERP provider, your Microsoft Office contract, and your CRM software. 

Do an internal assessment of these suppliers and determine:

• How much you’re spending;
  
• When you’re going to renew; and,
  
• What you’re planning to do in the future.
  

This will help you determine that you are, in fact, only paying for the items that you need versus those that you don’t. All too often companies are paying for products that they aren’t even using because they don’t have a handle on their contracts. 

The second thing you’ll be able to keep an eye out for is whether you’re paying for the right license types or not. Challenge your company to look at ways you can downgrade your subscriptions.

The third piece of knowledge you’ll gain from this process is figuring out which business capabilities each supplier is supporting. You’ll be able to see which suppliers are overlapping functionalities. 

This overlap is common in decentralized organizations. Each business stakeholder wants to use the software they’re familiar with even though three other companies provide the same capabilities. Your corporation is likely spending way too much on overlapping suppliers that provide the same digital capability.

Paying for software you’re not using is called shelfware. Don’t make the mistake of paying for shelfware. 

You need to start this internal assessment process six months before your next contract renewal. If you don’t, you’re going to be playing catch up to these large suppliers because they know more about you than you do.

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Step 3: Preparing for negotiation
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Create your negotiation team
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Your negotiation team should consist of 3 different roles: a business stakeholder, an IT stakeholder, and a negotiator. Sometimes this last role is procurement and sometimes it involves an outside advisor.
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​Gather benchmark data
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In addition to your negotiation team, you’ll need some hard-to-find information. One of the biggest pieces of leverage you can get is benchmark data. This data gives you the prices other firms are paying for the same service. There’s no way your company can know what other businesses are paying unless you bring in an external advisor like The Negotiator Guru.
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Create an opportunity analysis
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You can analyze your rates against the benchmark to find out how competitive your prices are compared to your industry peers. Similarly, you can analyze your supplier performance metrics, Service Level Agreements, governance process (etc.) against benchmark data to find out how well your suppliers are performing. 

And finally, you can analyze your Innovation Quadrant against the benchmark.

How is the supplier driving new ideas, new concepts, process improvements, etc? How are they incentivized to drive cost savings for YOUR company through their relationship with you?

For example:

If you’re using a company like Accenture to run your help desk, there should be a clause in the contract for a 10% target cost savings over the contract term for the services they provide. They do this through process improvements and through automation.

This ensures they are actively working toward providing your company with cost savings to make your business more efficient.
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Create a Roadmap of Initiatives
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This roadmap has the intent of prioritizing your initiatives to ensure you’re targeting the greatest impact that will take you the least amount of time.  Of course, not all initiatives will be easy to achieve but taking a systematic approach to what you work on first is paramount to your success. 

To assist with this approach, we suggest categorizing your initiatives so that you can easily sort and isolate the opportunities in front of you. Categories you might consider using include “Quick Win, Strategic Sourcing, and Business Transformational.” Naturally, the progression of cost savings usually increases in scope and impact as you move from Quick Win opportunities to that of Business Transformation. 

After you perform your opportunity analysis, get your benchmarks, and create your roadmap of initiatives, you can then pull together a Heat Map. This entails creating a visual graph that clearly identifies the sequencing opportunities. 

Here is an example of one of these Heat Maps:
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Being proactive with IT contracts can save 25% annually
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A stellar negotiation team together with your benchmark data and forward-looking road map will give you a clear direction during the renegotiation process.

Centralizing, and subsequently renegotiating, your contracts with this approach generates on an average 25% P/L cost savings for your company (industry agnostic). 
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A decentralized company can cost you extra money
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If a company has multiple business units and/or sites that are responsible for their own procurement you will undoubtedly have an unstructured supply base. The downstream effects of this situation is that you will have overlap in your supply base, duplicative digital capabilities, and a rats nest of contracts causing incredible inefficiencies and unleveraged spend.  

For example, if one branch is using DocuSign for e-signatures and another is using Panda, this is a digital capability overlap that can easily be eliminated.

After your company streamlines your digital capabilities, your company should be able to easily consolidate spend, processes, and contracts. Once you remove the redundancy and get everyone on the same software, you can also negotiate a single contract for your company that drives immediate cost savings and long-term cost avoidance. 
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IT Contracts create both opportunity and risk in Merger & Acquisition transactions

When combining companies, it’s important to do both a top-down and bottoms-up approach to identifying synergy opportunities within your IT spend. 

Top-down approaches involve a lot of financial synergy assumptions based on similar transactions within your industry. These approaches largely identify duplicative roles, processes, etc. and identify a financial target for savings. This approach naturally takes a high-level approach but doesn’t consider the unique needs of your business. To accurately forecast synergy opportunities it should not be the only synergy view to consider.

Bottoms-up approaches, on the other hand, allow you to co-create opportunities with your l business stakeholders that consider business risk, culture, and ease to achieve.

I’ll provide more insight on how to properly prepare for a merger in a future article.
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Wrapping It All Up

Follow these steps to properly optimize your current contracts:

1. Identify your current state situation.
2. Identify your high-spend suppliers.
3. Gather benchmark data to see how your contracts stack up.
4. Run an Opportunity Analysis to determine overlap and shelfware.
5. Create a negotiation team.
6. Optimize each contract as its renewal period approaches.

That’s it! 

Curious if there is an opportunity for cost reduction within your IT spend? Contact me at Dan@thenegotiator.guru for an initial free consultation.

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You may also be interested in: 

​What to Look Out for When Negotiating with ERP Providers like Oracle & SAP

​​My 3 Guiding Principles for The Negotiator Guru

​Understanding how Salesforce Negotiates

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