Unlocking Business Potential
through IT Strategy and Architecture

One of the large clients of Phoenix holds a strong market position in the United States of America as a leading telecommunication and peripheral services provider. Through their services, the company generates millions of dollars’ worth of revenue every day and offer high-quality services to its customers, which are both individual and organizations.

Phoenix collaborated with the client to address their Tail Spend challenges, focusing on identifying and capturing potential savings often overlooked due to lower individual transaction values. By zooming into the tail spend, Phoenix aimed to provide actionable insights and recommendations to effectively manage costs, supplier relationships, and compliance.

Tail Spend

Tail Spend refers to the significant volumes of procurement transactions which although represent a small portion of total expenditure, but collectively add up to a significant amount. These purchases typically fall into the bottom 20% of the expenditure and involve numerous small-scale supplier purchases.

Tail Spend Management involves identifying and optimizing these transactions to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and mitigate risks. Through tail spend management, organizations can unlock potential savings and enhance overall procurement performance by gaining better visibility into spendings and implementing strategies such as supplier consolidation and process standardization.

The Challenge: Increase Visibility into Tail Spend

Phoenix began with identifying the key areas that represented a significant portion of procurement spending. Findings of the study revealed that the lower transaction values of tail spending often led to overlooked savings. Based upon the findings, the following areas of improvement were identified:

1. Risks of unmanaged tail spend
2. Loss of cost-saving opportunities
3. Lack of product quality control
4. Potential compliance issues, especially in regulated industries
5. Loss of productivity due to avoidable transactions

Phoenix proposed a tail spend management portal into the existing spend analytics solution to track and manage tail spends, effectively generating a tool to make tail spend management efficient for the client.

In a world of evolving business needs, streamlined operations are the backbone of efficiency. This efficiency is not just operational, but also temporal. Time-efficient processes reduce TATs and subsequently aid in significantly optimizing operations that save costs and drive value up.

This case study explores two states of affair where Phoenix’s innovative web-based solutions transformed some of the most intricate processes for our customers, saving time and enhancing collaboration for streamlined and efficient B2B operations.

The First Affair : Order Tracking Simplified

The Challenge :

The client had been facing immense efficiency-related challenges to manually obtaining order statuses and updating process tracking metrics.
It was hard to keep up with the high volume of emails, and it is very time-consuming checking status in systems and replying to the vendor and other users via email.

Phoenix’s Solution :

Phoenix was tasked with finding a solution, develop the solution, and implement it for the client. Phoenix identified the following features such an order tracking system should have:

1. It should be web-based to enable anyone to track an order from anywhere.
2. Data should be real-time and open to enable users to track the status of any order based on the order ID.
3. The tracker should be easy to understand and intuitive to use for anyone visiting the URL.

Web-Based Order Tracker :

The web-based order tracker, once implemented, empowered customers to self-engage and check order status independently. Democratized data access for personnel made it easy to access order data without having to rely on slower channels such as emails, phone calls, etc., thereby reducing reliance on such traditional communication methods.

The Impact :

The implementation of a web-based order tracker has drastically reduced the load on the various mechanisms that were in place to cater to order tracking queries. As more users resorted to the faster, more efficient method of order tracking, each page view on the tracker saved approximately 30 minutes, more than 150 hours a month.
The success of the tracking system also helped save thousands of working hours spent behind order tracking when the process now happens within minutes.

The Challenge: Build a Reliable, User-Friendly Spend Analytics Platform

A Fortune 50 telecom company’s goal was to develop a customized web-based Spend Analytics solution that would enable them to optimize their multibillion-dollar procurement expenditures through timely visibility and relevant data insights. However, the company experienced several significant challenges with prior outsourcing initiatives that hindered their ability to realize their goals.

When they approached Phoenix for a solution to their problem, the developers and project management teams identified some key challenges:

1. Feature development cycle times were too long.
2. Spend data was not reliable, which severely reduced user adoption rates.
3. Website designs provided a poor user experience (UX).
4. System support was cumbersome and inadequate.

With a separate largescale Supply Chain Management (SCM) Analytics solution already providing customer delight to the telecom company, Phoenix was again entrusted to deliver a new Spend Analytics solution that would meet and exceed their expectations.