How to Optimize Your Technology Investment
While economic uncertainty is something almost every business leader is not only aware of but paying close attention to, there is one area where most leaders are not shying away from financially: technology investments.
In fact, according to a recent study by Spiceworks/Ziff Davis, the outlook for IT spending in 2023 is generally strong, with 90% of respondents saying they either planned to increase spending or keep it steady. Gartner also reports that worldwide tech spending is to grow to $4.5 trillion in 2023, up 2.3% over last year.
Knowing the vast majority of business leaders intend to increase or maintain their technology spending, it’s important for these same individuals to ensure they’re optimizing their technology investments. However, tech spend optimization can be difficult without the right tools, including a comprehensive technology expense management (TEM) audit.
For instance, if you take 10 different companies and ask them to define how and why they should explore how to save on telecom services, you’ll likely get the same answer: savings on technology services are unclear, time-consuming to clarify, and don’t always justify the level of effort required to see significant change.
As a result, technology bills continue to be paid, and businesses continue on their way without realizing money is being left on the table.
There’s no doubt a digital transformation is possible for any business looking to optimize tech spend. But if they don’t access tools to identify the big tech landscape picture and savings opportunities to support the transformation’s budget, a company’s leaders often don’t know where to start or what to monitor.
To optimize tech spend, a TEM audit can not only identify where to start on the journey to digital transformation, but what to focus on throughout that journey. It’s also important to consider the importance of using a TEM solution that pulls in proprietary technology spend analytics and human reasoning expertise, which ultimately helps leadership with business forecasting efforts.
The key areas businesses should focus on when utilizing a TEM audit solution to optimize tech spend include renegotiating and sourcing carrier contracts, benchmarking and analytics, and auditing and optimization.
The Importance of Renegotiating and Sourcing Carrier Contracts
Did you know that carrier billing errors are a source of large profit loss? Even with the current increasing trend to use AI-powered systems to detect erroneous charges on tech invoices, it’s often not enough. Human reasoning is vital for technology service data collection and processing to locate the causes of those errors.
This is why TEM audits that pair proprietary data and sophisticated software with hands-on analysis provide cost-reduction opportunities to benefit businesses looking to optimize expenses surrounding carrier contracts and ongoing billing.
An audit focusing on industry-specific proprietary data allows businesses to identify existing expenses, discounts, and promotional structures — especially as they relate to telecom, voice, data, internet, cloud services, mobility, and SaaS.
Once these expenses are identified, contracts are assessed to ensure inaccurate charges are eliminated. Ultimately, cost usage is clearly visible via a personalized saving opportunities dashboard, current market prices are applied when possible, and ongoing carrier conversations are held on the customer’s behalf, to ensure spend optimizations.
Carrier contracts are then compared to market benchmarks to determine if they are in line. These benchmark comparisons included with each SpyGlass SnapShot Audit find savings opportunities in over 92% of all client engagements.
“These savings opportunities come in all shapes and sizes,” explained Mike Farrell, Vice President, Implementation and Project Management at SpyGlass. “Our top five most successful cost reduction clients over the past two years resulted in well over $1M in savings.”
Aligning Benchmarks and Analytics to Optimize Your Tech Spend
While a traditional TEM audit can help your business identify areas of savings and process inefficiencies, a TEM audit that includes proprietary data elevates results.
“We created our proprietary TEM software to collect data on basically every single (technology) service under the sun throughout the country,” according to SpyGlass Vice President of Business Analytics, Owen Hood. “We have real-world examples of what real customers are paying for and what a vendor might be offering at any given time.”
A TEM audit with proprietary data across every industry helps forecast your technology expense future by:
- Uncovering untapped cost savings
- Removing unauthorized users
- Avoiding excessive fees
- Negotiating with providers on your behalf (and with data to back it up)
Results of a TEM audit powered by proprietary data also provide beneficial productivity gains across departments by reducing demands on staff and letting them focus on functions that fuel business.
This is especially advantageous in a world where more teams are working remotely, and located in different locations and time zones, yet still collaborate with one another on a regular basis. With a well-executed TEM audit, there is significantly more visibility into the technology being used, which allows for improving workflow efficiencies and reduces unnecessary costs.
With an industry-leading TEM audit that analyzes, control, and reduces your technology spending, business leaders can rest assured knowing they are equipped with tools resulting in long-term savings across tech service costs — including voice, data, internet, cloud services, SaaS license, and mobility.
As a company’s tech landscape continues to grow, a TEM audit that utilizes a robust pricing index allows for the ultimate comparison across all industries of pricing structures for specific classes of services.
Identify Mobility Savings With a Proven Audit and Optimization Process
In a world that operates in a hybrid fashion with some employees in the office all the time, while others come in a few times a week (or working remotely 100% of the time), industries of all kinds have more mobile devices than ever before.
Consider all of the mobile devices, portable hotspots, and teleconferencing devices deployed from the start of the pandemic to today. While necessary to meet the changing nature of how businesses and people operate, tracking these devices is something virtually all industries struggle with.
In addition, as people move to a hybrid/work-from-home structure, businesses boost mobility spending, and education institutions receive increased federal funding for 1:1 device allocation, cost centers can be difficult to manage without a thorough TEM audit to prepare for better mobile usage controls.
That said, identifying unused and excessive mobility devices drive impressive overall savings opportunities. “Last year, 22% of the overall opportunity we found came from unused/excessive mobility devices,” states Farrell. “It’s common to find six-figure opportunities given changes in the business climate.”
Move Your Tech Services Savings Optimization Forward
Now that you know the ins and outs of tech optimization and the areas to focus on, you’re more equipped to put your plans into action.
SpyGlass TEM specialists pair proprietary technology spend analytics and sophisticated software with hands-on analysis to help clients manage the human side of business forecasting.
To understand how a personalized SnapShot Audit and our team of Implementation Project Managers (IPM) and Audit and Analysis experts utilize an efficient and proven TEM process, each client is provided industry-leading savings solutions from our proprietary technology expense insights index.
From our kickoff meeting with a client to the presentation of savings opportunities, SpyGlass provides timely savings solutions for a wide variety of industries, regardless of the size and scope of telecom service billing.