Provincial government saves 50% of quarterly telecom budget with Upland Cimpl

The central telecom team needed detailed information to be able to reallocate and reduce costs. Cimpl supported them with automation, visibility and savings identification.

The Challenge

This Canadian province’s government was spending $1.3 million annually for wireline telecoms, with over 21,000 assets to manage. However, it was struggling to understand where its telecom-related costs were coming from. Without this knowledge, the central government could not reallocate costs to departments and agencies across the province and was unable to encourage accountability among its staff. With the prospect of adding wireless plans to its wireline services, the challenge was set to grow to unmanageable proportions.

When it came time to upgrade its telecom management from its old asset-focused system, the central office looked for a secure platform that would give it the visibility it needed over costs and usage. It wanted to know who, where, what and when. With the program about to expand to include mobile devices and services, it also hoped to obtain support in managing it.

Cimpl – a single-platform, automated solution

The provincial government chose Cimpl because it was able to respond to all its needs in one platform, coupled with managed services to help efficiently validate and track telecom services and assets. The Cimpl platform gave the government a single, centralized access point for all its telecom services providers, enabling easy communication, with little manual intervention. The automatic loading, processing and validating of invoices saved an average of 15 hours per month, enabling the telecom team to focus on reducing costs.

To do so, the team implemented showback and chargeback. Dashboards showed the split of expenses by cost centre, enabling every department and agency to see what and how it was spending, with visibility over assigned assets, services and costs. Employees were also able to understand how their usage compared to benchmarks and trends. With such transparency, specific departments and individuals became more aware of the need to reduce spending, and costs could be allocated to those concerned.

Benefits – cost accountability and major savings

By providing visibility over usage to end-users, accountability went up and costs went down. Cimpl’s team of experts also identified devices no-one was using but for which plans were still in place, as well as billing discrepancies, and requests for services to be deleted that had gone unactioned.

These improvements, along with the automating of recurring tasks, led to a cost savings of over $161,000 in a single quarter for the provincial government – almost 50% of its quarterly budget.  Overall it reduced its telecom spend by 72% in a single year.