Contract renewals planning for Sabio, the contact centre and Avaya specialist was a painful process with consultants filling in Excel spreadsheets to give them visibility of what contracts were due for renewal next. Using Excel for any business critical processes is risky, Excel may be a very good spreadsheet but using it as a planning tool or something else for which it has not been designed is inefficient. They turned to FinancialForce for a solution.
Sabio came to realise there were significant savings to be had by moving to a solution that was built for purpose, in fact they believe that they can achieve cost avoidance of £100,000 with the implementation of the FinancialForce SCM (Supply Chain Management) module. Rather than consultants sifting through multiple systems including Excel spreadsheets that may or may not have been updated correctly they have been able to reduce the time it took to create a client renewal plan report down from 2-3 weeks to just 20 minutes by running a report from the FinancialForce solution.
FinancialForce SCM
Contract management is just one of the features of its SCM module, and the SCM just one of the modules within the ERP solution that FinancialForce provide. The module is perhaps aimed more at manufacturing companies traditionally but service orientated companies like Sabio should be able to take advantage of many of its feature:
B2B Quoting: The solution allows users to have multiple configurations of price lists, allowing for promotions, tangible and intangible items and well as providing upsell options. For example Sabio might be able to offer faster response in certain areas of the country for its telephony support. The solution also supports workflow for pricing approval, thus improving response times to customers.
Order Management: FinancialForce supports EDI and eCommerce integration as well as through more traditional methods. It can also give Salesteams greater visibility of stock availability, not just that goods are out of stock but also when they are next due in.
Spend Management: Track suppliers, and identify where money is being spent and overspent, there are features that support the identification of contract leakage and also track contract performance for suppliers.
Inventory Management: Manage inventory effectively, including tracking down to serial numbers and actual cost. Important when tracking faulty batches of goods that have been delivered to customers.
Assemble to Order: Creating Bills of Materials for the assembling of equipment or indeed orders.
Contract Management: The module that Sabio implemented allows staff to manage the whole lifecycle of contracts effectively. It can track contract changes and renewals and with reporting indicate to the sales team in an appropriate time when the contract is likely to be considered by the client. This is critical in that some companies forget to get engaged early enough thus leaving the door open for competitors. The software also allows clients to track the Total Contract value across the lifecycle of the client. Understanding the profit margins of given contracts is important during the renewal phase, especially for service companies that do not want to sign up to renew unprofitable contracts.
Martin Eggleton, Consultant at Sabio commented “We are extremely pleased with the success achieved thus far with FinancialForce SCM, … Before, we would spend hours tracking down contracts and managing them in various systems. We finally have a single view of our contract and revenue streams, not to mention our cost and time savings have been significant.”
