Managed Sourcing
Source Loop employs its unique SourceCycle methodology as the basis to deliver our managed sourcing services. This approach has been developed to lower our clients' telecom service price points by 15% - 50%, negotiate the most advantageous contract terms/conditions and improve overall vendor performance.
Click on each step in the cycle to reveal its contents.
Assess: The initial step of any successful solution acquisition process is to fully assess the current situation and future needs of an organization. This assessment becomes the baseline to establish the scope and guide the solution acquisition process:
- Compile existing cost, usage and contract data
- Analyze current technologies/architectures against best in class
- Create a situation bookdetailing the services deployed across the enterprise
- Review existing contract terms / commitments
- Determine the best services and solutions to satisfy the organization's current and future needs
Benchmark: Most competitive sourcing exercises will likely yield better rates. However, obtaining the best available market rate requires access to fresh market rate / contract data, modeling tools to effectively compare vendor offers with the best rates and terms available. An effective Benchmark will:
- Identify market comps for contracts with similar requirements and volumes
- Compare all critical rate element and contract terms against the best in market
- Establish your element level price targets and preferred terms
Source: For any telecom service, the sourcing process is time consuming and difficult to manage. Our experience has proven that sourcing efficiency is obtained by leveraging pre-configured online applications which enable the ability to:
- Quickly prescreen and determine the eligible vendor pool
- Easily tailor RFP/I/Q processes and documents specific to your organizations needs
- Enable a collaborative response evaluation process
- Immediately analyze offers relative to the competition and best available market rates
- Conduct online bidding / reverse auctions
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Negotiate: Once the final vendors have been determined, an agreement with the following attributes needs to be developed and agreed upon by the parties:
- Contract rates as agreed upon during the sourcing phase resulting from reverse auctions/negotiations.
- Terms and conditions that allow the utmost flexibility in operations related to volume commitments, use of technologies, changes in financial condition of either party, adherence to service levels, etc.
- Terms and condition language that can withstand the scrutiny of our legal partners as to enforceability.
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Implement: At the conclusion of the vendor negotiation process, seamless implementation across the organization is necessary to achieve the operational and financial benefits. Contemplating the impacts of service implementation is a key consideration throughout the process.
- Define implementation / migration scope early in the process
- Populate implementation / migration project plan
- Assess early risk and mitigate with vendor selection and or contract
- Manage implement / migration against agreed to contract terms
- Hand-off to on-going operation
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Verify: Shortly after implementation of the new contract, billed rates are verified to determine compliance with the new contract. The following items are reviewed:
- Review vendor invoices to validate rate and discount compliance with negotiated terms
- Verify invoices agree with service inventories
- Identify and document discrepancies
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Resolve: Resolving billing and performance issues is a necessary component of any service or sourcing lifecycle in order to maintain a good relationship with user and vendor. An effective resolution process includes:
- Concise communications of the discrepancy to vendor
- Predefined process detailing how billing and service level issues are resolved
- A mechanism to fix billing and service issues and prevent the reoccurrence of these time-consuming issues
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