How to create a Telecom Category Business Plan
Depending on how organized you are, creating an annual Telecom Category Business Plan can be an easy feat – or the challenge of your life – to pull together. The main purpose of creating an annual business plan is to reflect where you are today and pull together a plan for what you aim to accomplish within your organization by the end of the year. In order to succeed Sourcing Managers must pull together their contracts, inventories, financial spend and supplier relationship analyses.
Remember keep your plan simple, to the point and focus on who your target audience is.
So how are you going to do this? Start with an overview and summary of your carriers, contracts, inventory, and performance and then pull together a plan of action..!
So let’s go!….
Contracts
Summarize your contractual obligations i.e. spend commitments, terms, termination rights, liabilities, deal credits and discounts. Making sure you fully understand how you’re trending against your spend commitments is vital as no-one, customers or vendors, want to discover 3 months prior to the end date that your spend run rate is below what you need in order to hit your contractual target.
In addition, you need to review your contract benchmark rights, and the timings relating to when you can benchmark your current costs. Oh – and by the way – make sure you capture the notice period for auto renewals – you don’t want to start negotiating a renewal at 60 days out only to find out it renewed for the same price at 90!
Focus on managing the pipeline of inventory and contract end dates within the next year. Typically, it is best practice to analyze the report and break the contract pipeline summary into manageable chunks e.g. 30-60 days, 90-180 days etc. or as we prefer, by quarter. Remember to keep it manageable! Your contract summary only needs to focus on your top 5-10 major suppliers where you have 80% of your services and spend today.
Inventory
Pulling together your inventory is about as straight forward as it gets! Run reports against your inventory to gain an understanding of:
- What services are in place and where.
- Which services are provided by what carriers.
- How are those services performing
- Utilization: Data, Voice and Mobile
Pulling it all together:
You have all of this data so now what? It’s all now at your fingertips so you can analyze the data to get an overview of what the data is telling you. Now you’re ready to build the business plan.
Here are our top 12 essentials to include in your plan:
- Services which can be re-negotiated because they are out of contract
- Perform a benchmark
- Disconnecting services, which are no longer in use.
- Review your mobile inventory and shut off devices with zero usage
- Connectivity to locations that are no longer active.
- Deep dive review of projects and ensure the old connectivity has been disconnected.
- Migrating services to new suppliers as a result of performance issues
- Mobile optimization – Analyze user traffic profiles optimize your usage profiles and confirm users are on the right mobile plans
- Voice Analysis – Analyze traffic profiles to understand usage, markets, number of cost, cost per minute
- Voice Least Cost Routing (LCR) objectives
- Technology change opportunities
- Network optimization consolidation and network upgrades
Don’t make the mistake of going off by yourself and becoming a Rocket Man… “Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone….”
Once you’ve pulled together your draft plan set up a meeting with your key business stakeholders, identify a sponsor and get their buy-in with regards to the plan, and an agreement on the way forward. Without an internal sponsor who will assist in leading the business plan and supporting the team through challenges and support with internal politics (because we all know it exists) you will not be as successful.
Be sure that you have engineering resources in place to support technical related topics, challenges and questions. Service Delivery resource is super important! No matter what, Service Delivery must support and manage the network based on the decisions made. Ensure that Service Delivery is involved to support performance related topics associated with SLAs and KPIs of the current network, as well as to implement any proposed changes.
Finally lets not forget about finance – At the end of the day without finance support to validate financial models and to track the business plan through in terms of forecasting and validating the realized net impact of the business plan, it will be viewed as smoke and mirrors.
Conclusion
Remember keep your plan simple to the point and focus on who your target audience is. Keep it sharp and interesting, include headlines that encapsulate the message of particular slides. Be sure to include charts and graphs to backup the analysis of your key messages and most importantly capture and report frequently with the internal teams. Following these steps will help you create a stellar annual plan that will really set your business amongst the stars.
Temforce is a SaaS Telecom Category Management app: Our application will deliver the transparency you need to ensure you’ve groomed your network and squeezed every savings possible from it. Quickly assess the ROI of auditing and installing temforce into your workflow.