Providing benchmarking consultancy to advise contract renegotiations with two incumbent IT services suppliers.
One of the UK’s top five ‘Magic Circle’ law firms contacted eXceeding looking for help with its IT benchmarking and contract renegotiation requirements.
The global firm, which employs thousands of legal and other staff, wanted helped to sense-check four distinct existing contracts relating to the provision of Wide Area Network (WAN), Unified Comms-as-a-Service (UCaaS), Voice-over IP (VoIP) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).
eXceeding’s IT contracts benchmarking team consulted market data and performed soft market testing to allow eXceeding’s team to benchmark the client’s current costs and provision against what would be available to it if the services were retendered at that time.
The resulting reports provided the evidence required for the firm to enter into negotiations with its current service providers that enabled a saving of tens of millions of pounds a year on IT spend. The reports included a negotiation strategy with steps and a process to follow.
The law firm was referred to eXceeding by a mutual business partner in 2018. The company’s procurement team had a series of four IT service contracts subject to a benchmarking review, but lacked the internal expertise and access to data to perform the required market testing.
The firm had excellent benchmarking clauses included in all its supplier contracts, which enabled eXceeding to deploy its full expertise to best effect in pursuit of the optimum commercial improvements for the future of the contracts.
With the cost of WAN provision in particular falling at a rate of around 50% every three years due to increased capacity, the firm believed there may be a significant amount of money to be saved by renegotiating with its incumbent supplier. eXceeding’s task was to provide the necessary evidence to support that process.
With a lack of robust contract and supplier relationship management in place, and having been through a number of internal staff changes, there was limited understanding within the business of the contracts they had in place, or how they could be improved.
There was a large amount of complicated paperwork and data to review, including lengthy invoices, service credit regimes and current usage. Our team was to identify any issues with overpayment or under provision by the two service providers under contract, as well as recommend areas for general improvement.
Our IT market benchmarking experts performed a deep-dive on all four contracts and their related invoices, service credit regimes and usage data.
We then consulted market data and performed soft market testing to establish what provision would be available to the company should it take its requirements to market at that time – and at what price.
The subsequent written reports prepared by our benchmarking consultants identified several reductions in supplier costs over the length of the contract so far that had not been passed on to the law firm.
We also identified a systemic issue with overcharging on one contract, as well as with promised rebates that had not been applied.
The reports were used by the firm to renegotiate all four contracts with the two incumbent suppliers, resulting in improved provision at much reduced cost on all for the remainder of the contract duration.
By engaging eXceeding as benchmarking consultants, this legal company was able to achieve annual savings of between 30% and 60% on its WAN, VOIP and UCaaS provision, as well as an additional 15% reduction in expenditure on its IaaS contract. In total, these savings amounted to millions of pounds.
The firm was surprised and delighted by the cost savings identified by eXceeding. Its leadership appreciated our support in renegotiating the company’s position with its incumbent suppliers, ensuring the business was paying a fair price for its IT services without the risk that would come with changing providers.
CRFCA’s asked us to run a OJEU compliant tender process for the procurement of IT support and infrastructure services. We managed the entire process, working closely with their internal stakeholders.
eXceeding was engaged by Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust to handle complex exit negotiations, as well as providing an experienced, onsite team to manage the transition to the new IT service provider.
Capco asked eXceeding to fully assess their current IT service catalogue and recommend the right future solution for their outsourced IT managed service support.
