#1 – Consolidate Your Purchase Decisions (Procurement)
With over 30 years of experience spanning thousands of customers, from the local Mom ‘n Pop Shop that needs reliable internet that won’t break the bank, to the tri-state non-profit that needs to add bandwidth to support video conferencing, all the way up to multi-national corporations forklifting their MPLS networks to SD-WAN, The Comtel Group has helped all types of customers. And from straightening out the spaghetti wiring in the IT closet all the way to trouble-shooting nation-to-nation voice peering routes, Comtel has helped resolve more problems than any single-business IT professional could ever possibly have to worry about. With such a broad perspective, it should be meaningful, then, when we say that the # 1 most common problem we encounter across businesses of all sizes, industries, and locations, is a decentralized purchasing process.
The most harmful aspect of decentralized purchasing to an organization is “organic growth.” If you’ve ever come across a patch of untamed land, you’ll already be familiar with the impact that organic growth can have on a space. Not only is it a mess that requires extreme effort to maneuver through, but as soon as you look beyond the surface you’ll see that new growth has covered the older, causing them to wither but not quite die completely, forgotten and no longer serving a purpose, but still consuming resources. Having multiple people purchase technologies leads to the same sort of organic growth within a business. Different people reference different documents to determine what resources are available; different documents provide different answers, inevitably leading to ordering unnecessary and often duplicate resources. As employees come and go, new documents replace old ones, and those unnecessary resources become unknown resources, which eventually become resources that are forgotten by the IT department, but still paid for every month. No one wants to disconnect it without knowing its purpose, but no one has the time to find out what it’s connected to. Decentralized buying also encourages bureaucracy, with more decision makers resulting in committees to review, which not only slows the decision-to-fulfillment time frame, but also allows for resource-eating inter-factional bickering to sprout up.
The solution is relatively simple: allow only one person to be the central authorization for all technology purchasing decisions. Of course this person can seek input from peers and be held accountable by supervisors, but there must be only one voice that approves the decision to purchase any specific technology for an organization. Whoever you assigned must also take ownership of inventorying all resources and consulting that inventory when new resources are requested. Some organizations attempt to have different people take responsibilities for different types of technologies. While this does limit duplication and waste within any single technology, this completely misses the opportunity to consolidate and bundle different technologies. Not only does bundling allow a greater overall discount, but it allows an opportunity to see the forest from the trees, and ensure that we aren’t buying two technologies when we could be buying just one.
The biggest catch to this whole principle is that the expertise necessary to coordinate the evaluation and purchasing of all different types of technologies is often times more than a single person can handle, especially when competing with day-to-day activities. In these situations, you can gain significant breathing room by offloading the resource-allocation and service-procurement responsibilities to a managed service provider. As you may or may not know, every service provider is already allocating up to 15% of your invoice to a sales representative. At the very least, make sure you don’t let those monies go to waste, and pick a person or entity that you can help you reclaim what would typically be lost commission dollars, and leverage them for tangible business outcomes.
