All posts by Sharon R Watkins

28% Reduction in Trash Spend

Trimming expenses on waste management serves as the initial step in an organization’s sustainability journey. A prominent elevator company operating worldwide successfully slashed its monthly waste expenditure by 28%. Additionally, by securing a corporate contract, they paved the way for greater savings across their new locations, fortifying their commitment to sustainability.

Issues

Our client grappled with numerous challenges in its billing and services. Upon conducting an initial review, it became evident that over 40 locations had individually inked contracts with local waste haulers. Consequently, these contracts staggered in expiration, often incurring hefty early termination fees. This complexity rendered negotiating a unified corporate contract unfeasible within the initial twelve months of gaining contract and service visibility.

Solution

To tackle these issues, the organization teamed up with RadiusPoint. Collaborating on bill processing and payment services for their monthly waste invoices, RadiusPoint unearthed a route toward cost reduction during the standard optimization process.

RadiusPoint’s optimization process delved into scrutinizing services provided by the existing vendor, aiming to uncover contractual obligations and service specifics. Numerous locations had ordered services sporadically without considering contract terms, bin sizes, or pickup frequency. RadiusPoint conducted a comprehensive analysis across the organization, tailoring services to match the office types and specific service requirements to ensure an appropriate fit.

During our inventory and audit of the waste services, RadiusPoint:

• Obtained a copy of the vendor’s current contract.
• Validated the contract rates against the current invoice.
• Compared services across all sites for any anomalies.
• Identified overage charges or other charges beyond the normal pick-up charges.
• Identified better rates for those locations not under contract.
• Identified better rates and possible early termination penalties, if applicable, for those locations under contract
• Recommend service changes to eliminate overage charges.
• Provided consolidated report for Request for Proposal (RFP).
• Provided analysis once RFP is returned to show savings.
• Assisted with contract negotiations for each contract or global contract.
• Managed the transition project.
• Assisted with issues that arose at the location during the term of the agreement.

Results

Partnering with RadiusPoint empowered the client to leverage our exclusive software, ExpenseLogic. This tool facilitated the seamless processing and payment of monthly invoices while concurrently conducting an audit to guarantee precise billing per contracted rates. This meticulous approach culminated in an impressive 28% decrease in monthly waste expenses. Embracing transparency in management paves the way for astute business choices, fostering cost-effectiveness, operational efficiency, and the achievement of sustainability objectives. Entrust RadiusPoint to guide you toward attaining your business savings targets, specifically with your waste services.

Reducing Telecom Expenses by 26% in Healthcare

RadiusPoint collaborated with an Assisted Living and Nursing Home organization to enhance their oversight of telecom, IT, and wireless expenses. Serving as their telecom expense management (TEM) partner, RadiusPoint offered comprehensive insight into their invoices and spending and the range of services and equipment deployed across each site. This detailed visibility enabled RadiusPoint to identify and deactivate over 700 dormant business lines at various locations leading to a 26% reduction of their annual spend or $475k once the lines were disconnected and removed from the invoices.

Background

Given the healthcare industry’s focus on emergency preparedness, there’s a constant demand for reliable access to emergency personnel. Landlines play a critical role in ensuring immediate response in case of facility emergencies. Each location is mandated to have two copper lines for direct fire notification, with the option to add more lines for direct point-to-point access to the fire department. Safety for patients and staff is the top priority for this organization, necessitating RadiusPoint to meticulously validate vendor-provided information at every site.

Issues

The organization lacked previous inventory and audits of its telecom, IT, and wireless services. The service introduced detailed identification of each service type on vendor invoices, outlining all features, fees, taxes, and surcharges billed for each phone number. Various telecom vendors used different billing formats, with some providing only the total amount due without specific service descriptions or associated phone numbers. This limited visibility hindered effective decision-making regarding service removal or cost reduction through optimization.

As the costs of regular business lines escalated with vendors, the organization faced pressure to cut expenses. However, stringent regulations and safety protocols concerning patient well-being posed a challenge. Over the past two years, regular business line costs surged significantly, soaring from $50.00 to over $200.00 per line. Although newer, more cost-effective technology existed, regulatory restrictions prevented its use for regular business lines, prioritizing security measures.

Solution

RadiusPoint conducted an audit and inventory, yielding crucial information for eliminating unnecessary lines. This initiative validated services and phone lines across all sites, uncovering errors and overcharges in invoices. Some invoices continued to bill for services canceled years ago, obscured by invoice complexity or consolidation. RadiusPoint’s scrutiny pinpointed erroneous charges like features and taxes on phone lines canceled five years prior, prompting requests for credits from the vendor. In one case, even after an account was disconnected, circuits associated with it continued to bill due to a failed disconnection request.

The inventory and audit process began by verifying each phone line’s use through multiple calls and on-site visits for lines without responses. This process revealed over 700 unused regular business lines, some unconnected even in the phone rooms at various locations. Additionally, RadiusPoint offered recommendations to reduce line counts and optimize necessary lines. This enhanced visibility into remaining monthly expenses, enabling contract negotiations with vendors, and resulting in a further 10% cost reduction.

Results

Now equipped with ExpenseLogic, RadiusPoint’s proprietary software, this organization possesses comprehensive visibility into its telecom invoices and a complete inventory management system. In the Site Manager section of ExpenseLogic, a single click grants their team access to detailed invoice images, individual phone lines, circuits, wireless numbers, service features, and monthly costs for each location. Their annual savings exceeding $500k, alongside the elimination of 700 unnecessary lines, have led to reduced costs, improved services, and heightened accuracy in their monthly telecom billing.

Most organizations with multiple locations will have many telephone vendors that they must deal with daily. Each Telecom vendor will have different service offerings that will create confusion and ambiguous monthly invoices.

How do you keep your organization from overpaying for your services or having the wrong ones in place at each location?

Organizations require telecom services at each location for several reasons:

• Regulatory – fire alarm and elevator lines
• Security – alarm lines for the security system
• Order Management – Point of Sale (POS) over data circuits
• Customer Access – Direct Lines to departments for customers
• Connectivity for location to corporate – Data circuits
• Long distance – Connecting the location to the outside world for long-distance calls
• Wireless Service – Wireless devices for employees

These services will be provided by multiple vendors, which means that there will be multiple invoices for each location, each month. Identifying the best vendor with the best rates is not the beginning of the quest to eliminate overcharges. The beginning is the deep dive that is required to identify what services are already in place and how those services are used.

Most organizations have specific telephone needs that require circuits and copper lines for each location. Keeping up with the circuit numbers, each copper line phone number, and what it is used for is a cumbersome task.

For one retailer, not ensuring that services and equipment were properly cataloged and monitored created an embarrassing situation for the telecom and IT team and overcharges of over $62k paid needlessly by the retailer.

Retailers must have telephone numbers that allow a patron to call a specific department such as men’s shoes or children’s clothing. To have this type of service a retailer needs to have direct lines to each department.

Keeping an inventory of the circuits and phone numbers may have identified that the services were not canceled when the location closed. The other issue that created this overcharge situation was the ambiguous invoice from the telephone vendor.

The billing did not break down the services with enough detail to allow the telecom and IT team to realize that when they requested the services to be disconnected, not all services were disconnected. This oversight caused a 2 year overpayment period of $62k.

So, beyond the obvious of making sure your company is not overpaying for services, why is this deep dive needed?

In the Telecom industry, this deep dive is referred to as an inventory and audit of the telecom and IT services. This inventory and audit should create a baseline of service types, costs, contracts, and invoices.

It should also validate what services you have, the location address, and the department or personnel using the services. Identifying errors, overcharges and inefficiencies in your environment will bring the entire process together to cut costs and increase efficiency.

Having this information detailed by location would have saved this retailer over $60k because when the services were no longer needed and a disconnect request was made, it would have been quickly identified that the services continued to bill.

Identifying the right partner to work with to perform the inventory and audit is a must. There are many organizations that will “audit” your telephone invoices, some only charging for a portion of the savings however, defining exactly what will be audited and what the deliverables should be the first questions asked of your potential partner.

If you need this deep dive to identify very detailed information about your current telecom environment, you will most likely not receive that with a contingency-based model as often these are quick looks at the services to identify the low-hanging fruit.

The deep dive needed to specifically identify all services and their purpose will need to be performed by a project-based company that defines the deliverables with multiple steps and a very detailed work product.

Identifying the information that will be included in the inventory and audit is one of the first steps in gathering the information required and a timeline that will produce cost-saving results. One of the most frequent inventory and audits performed is for copper lines or Plain Old Telephone System (POTS) lines.

These lines are often required for businesses for alarm or elevator lines. Several years ago, this was the best and most cost-effective solution, however, innovation has created new types of services that work better and are much more cost-effective.

A business can transition over to these new services. However, if you do not have an inventory of all of your current services and phone lines, you run the risk of not disconnecting all of the POTS lines and you will keep paying for them.

A recent inventory and audit identified over 600 POTS phone lines that should have been canceled years before, however, the locations continued to pay for the lines because they had no idea the lines still existed.

The services had moved to a more modern service at a much lower cost, but the telecom team performing the work did not realize that the lines continued to bill. This oversight cost this company over $30k per month.

How can your chosen partner prevent this type of oversight from occurring? Identifying all the current services is the best place to start by ensuring that you’re only paying for what you need.

A successful project consists of a framework for managing fixed telecom environments that focuses on people, processes, and tools/technology. The inventory and audit establish a contract, invoice, service detail, and cost baseline.

The visibility gained through the project supports technology selection, budgeting, contract negotiations, vendor relationships, change management, and other integral telecom activities.

What type of information is needed to complete an inventory and audit?

• Location address
• Service contracts
• Invoices
• Customer Service Records
• Organizational information
• Service ordering process

Identifying the services and lines or circuits is one of the most important areas of the project as this is where most of the hidden services are found. Ensuring that an organization is only paying for the services that they want, and need is an integral part of the process and can uncover thousands in savings.

During an inventory and audit for an auto parts after-market organization, it was uncovered that there were 25 toll-free lines billing long-distance calls however the lines did not belong to them.

The lines were billed through the long-distance carrier and were on an invoice that was billed monthly; however, the total invoice cost was over $500k monthly and was more than 1,000 pages in length.

The only way this type of overcharge is identified is by calling each phone line to ask who the line belongs to. Once this occurred, the lines were moved from the organization’s account, saving them $10k per month.

Verifying ownership of the services is the first part of the process and once the services are verified as belonging to your organization, it is necessary to ensure that the monthly charges are accurate.

Identifying where contracts exist for each location is time-consuming but a required part of performing the inventory and audit steps. A quick-service restaurant learned the hard way that obtaining a global contract does not mean that you can set it up and forget about it.

For their 280 locations, the Internet Service Provider (ISP) set up services under contract, however, they set up an incorrect rate plan that caused this client to bill at a higher rate for each location’s Internet service.

The higher rate cost them $16,000.00 for the year, something that they had not budgeted for, and the overage caused financial reporting issues for their locations.

With the various types of services telephone or landlines, wireless, internet, long distance, etc. the steps to complete the inventory and audit are different for each type of service.

Ensuring that your partner is fully versed on each type of service and understanding what steps will be taken to audit each type of service will eliminate issues during the deliverable phase.

Upon completion of the project, you should have a set of these discoveries. It will also give you the baseline of information you need to effectively manage your environment on an ongoing basis, optimizing cost-effectiveness and efficiency.

Completion of this project will provide key insights, revealing what services are installed, where services are installed, what services are invoiced, and how much services cost.

This project will provide you with the comfort of a complete inventory of your telecom environment and will give you the baseline of information needed to manage your telecom environment in the most efficient and cost-effective manner.

With the skyrocketing costs for telecom services and the need for fiscal responsibility in the face of inflation and possible recession, it is imperative that a business consistently monitors their telecom and IT invoices and services.

Many organizations have a workable Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) plan in place.  However, Environmental Social Governance (ESG) will be the new benchmark going forward to ensure that both your organization and brand stay relevant and socially acceptable.  How does your organization get ready and stay ready for this very intricate and detailed reporting that is required for electric, gas, and water consumption?

Challenge

A nationwide retailer with over 1,600 locations has required reporting for the electric, gas and water consumption for each one of their locations.  The information required must be gathered from the monthly invoices.   The time to gather this information manually would have taken over 800 hours which would have involved someone reviewing each invoice for each month and contacting the vendor for the necessary information that was missing from the invoice.

Issues to Resolve

1. Time constraints – the reporting is needed during the 1^st quarter of the year for the previous year
2. Personnel constraints – The Accounts Payable team did not have time which required temporary staff to be hired
3. Knowledge Gap – the vendor’s invoices vary from vendor to vendor so being able to read an electric, gas, or water invoice was necessary to get the work completed timely
4. Invoice Availability – the invoices for a portion of the required review had been moved off-site and had to be recalled for this review.

Opportunity

Identifying the requirements early in the relationship with RadiusPoint and this client created the perfect opportunity for this client to have the required reporting in advance of the need.  RadiusPoint provides the monthly utility expense management services for each of the 1,600 locations from receipt of the invoice to the bill pay portion of the process.  This utility expense management also involves energy expense management that identifies the usage in kWh, therms, and gallons to create more detailed reporting.  Using the information that was already being gathered from the invoices and adding the additional required information, RadiusPoint was able to ensure that this client had the required reporting by location for each type of service.

Solutions

The data usage that is needed from each invoice is compiled by the chosen ESG company that creates the client’s overall ESG report.  Having this accurate data when it is needed was paramount to the client.   The data is required during the first quarter of the next year for the previous year which puts a large burden on an already busy Accounts Payable department.  RadiusPoint was able to pull together the reporting and provided an ongoing report solution so that the following year, the report would be completed by the last week of January for the entire previous year.  This solution allows the RadiusPoint team to review the data and add any missing components on a monthly basis to ensure that all data is reported for the year by the beginning of the following year.  This solution alone eliminated the normal delays of trying to identify who would be pulling together this information and when it would be provided.

Once the client looked at hiring temporary staff to pull the additional required data from the invoice, it was determined that this project would involve over 800 man-hours for the 1,600 locations.  RadiusPoint’s solution provided most of the required usage data and the RadiusPoint team was able to go through and identify the missing information quickly to populate as required.

Utility invoices are not easily deciphered and having staff to read the invoices and gather the necessary data was a stumbling block for this client.  Trying to find the staff that could perform this data gathering task that was knowledgeable about the electric, gas and water services was problematic.  RadiusPoint’s team has an ESG department with knowledgeable personnel that easily filled this knowledge and personnel gap for the client.

Having the invoices on hand presented a problem for this client but it was one that was easily resolved by RadiusPoint.  All invoices processed by RadiusPoint are electronically attached to the account number and the digital image is saved for up to seven (7) years.  Reviewing past invoices was made easy with the information readily available at the click of a mouse.

The Results

Most ESG programs make provisions for reducing the cost of those services, but the “how” to achieve these cost reductions can be hard to predict.   Measuring consumption is the first step in the right direction to reducing usage and monthly costs.  The monthly ESG management services allow for the client to see the usage information on a monthly basis which in turn allows for necessary pivots that could result in a reduction of usage.

RadiusPoint’s monthly invoice processing and expense management services manage the utility invoice from receipt to payment of the invoice.  Utility and telecom auditing are also important parts of the monthly service that allows RadiusPoint to fully manage the entire lifecycle of the utility or telecom invoice and service.  This client saved over $48k and received their detailed and required ESG reporting on time.