Where to Start with an RFx

We go through the RFx process numerous times throughout the year and the top question we are almost always asked is: where do we get all the detailed rate, plan, SLA and terms information we have at our disposal? The second most frequently asked question is how are we going to do the project itself? In this blog we describe how we get things done at Network Control, and by extension, show industry best practices in action.

Before anything else, you need to start with an overview and summary of your carriers, contracts, inventory, and network stats and then pull together a plan of action. First step, therefore, is:

Contracts Review
What we do first is to summarize your contractual obligations. This usually starts with outlining your spend commitments, terms, termination rights, liabilities, deal credits and discounts. This information will give us full visibility as to how you’re trending against your spend commitments. It is imperative that customers know what they have in order to make good business decisions.

Benchmarking is a big step often missed. In this phase, we review your contract benchmark rights and the timeframes relating to when you can benchmark your current costs. Also, we capture the notice period for auto renewals and make sure this is halted if the incumbent is bidding on the RFx.

Focus on managing the pipeline of inventory and contract end dates within the next year. Typically, it is best to analyze the report and break the contract pipeline summary into manageable timeframes – 30-60 days, 90-180 days.

Inventory Assessment
Next we run reports against your inventory to gain an understanding of these components:

1. What services are active and where?
2. Which services are provided by what carriers?
3. How are those services performing?
4. Utilization: Data, Voice and Mobile

Putting Together the RFx
You have all of this data so now what?

Here’s the framework of a typical plan of action:

1. Re-negotiated services because they are out of contract.
2. Perform a benchmark.
3. Disconnect services that aren’t in use.
4. Review your mobile inventory and suspend or shut off devices with zero usage.
5. Migrating services to new suppliers as a result of performance or outage issues.
6. Mobile optimization – Analyze user traffic profiles optimize your usage profiles and confirm users are on the right mobile plans.
7. Voice Analysis – Analyze traffic profiles to understand usage, markets, number of cost, cost per minute.
8. Voice Least Cost Routing (LCR) objectives.
9. Technology change opportunities.
10. Network optimization consolidation and network upgrades.

Once the draft plan is in place, the next step is to set up a meeting with your key business stakeholders, identify a sponsor, get their buy-in for the plan, and agreement on the way forward. In our experience—and this is important—without an internal sponsor who will assist in leading the business plan and supporting the team through challenges, the project, however well planned, will not be anywhere near as successful.

We also strongly recommend that you have engineering resources in place to support technical topics, challenges and questions. Service Delivery resources are super important! 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.

Lastly and most important is finance. 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.

Put all these pieces together and you have a successful RFx process, one which will yield substantial financial benefits to your company. But don’t rush headlong into the process alone—choose a partner like Network Control who can bring not only domain expertise, but detailed competitive knowledge to the project, ensuring its success.