50 CHANNELVISION | JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2024 As a leading cost reduction and contract compliance firm, SIB has a long history of helping companies leverage data and automation to lower business service costs without compromising service levels. SIB helps create financial value by optimizing everyday expenses and saving potentially millions of dollars that go straight to the bottom line. The key lies in SIB’s robust data intelligence, namely a $30 billion benchmarking database that the company leverages to drive informed contract negotiations for its clients. This, combined with thousands of automated audits and deep subject matter expertise across multiple spend categories, puts SIB in the driver’s seat when talking pricing and terms with service providers. SIB’s experts know the best available rates and which concessions to ask for across services ranging from shipping and insurance to utilities and waste. SIB also ensures companies receive negotiated savings and the right service levels through managed services and automated invoice auditing processes. Big savings beyond contract negotiations In industries such as telecom, smart spending becomes significantly more complicated. In fact, a whopping 70 percent or more of telecom invoices contain billing errors. Costly mistakes are largely driven by legacy and antiquated billing and ordering systems that often default to non-optimal contract vehicles. Additional auditing considerations include the application of telecom taxes, surcharges and fees — an area of expertise for SIB and a ready path to savings and potential partnership. Carriers and end users also stand to gain from right-sizing and optimization efforts as well as modernization studies, which benefit from SIB’s engineering and regulatory awareness. SIB’s telecom and blockchain expert division, Sage Management, has helped carriers, enterprises and government agencies save more than $4 billion by identifying and correcting order errors after the fact. Today, Sage focuses on how to resolve this challenge on the front end of the order and service deployment cycle. To truly enable smarter spending in telecom, SIB and Sage are jointly pioneering a mutually endorsed immutable ledger that will optimize the telecom ordering process at the point of order, automatically validating the best contract vehicles and available rates. In other words, Sage is using blockchain to proactively fix costly billing problems before they happen. Indeed, advances in blockchain are crucial to smart spending in telecom, and as these solutions evolve, SIB is helping carriers, enterprises and government agencies prepare for the migration to blockchain by: • Ensuring accurate telecom inventories, inclusive of contracts and services. • Turning paper MSAs into computer code and creating smart custom contract logic for every service type and contract vehicle, both public and private, to enable automated, real-time rating and optimal pricing for every asset and order. • Automating SLA enforcement and reconciliation by using blockchain to handle credits in real-time. Continued innovation and expertise Sage’s blockchain work is just one example of how SIB is leveraging its powerful arsenal of data intelligence and automation to change the expense management landscape and secure its position as the most diverse expense management company in the country. SIB’s platform of subject matter expertise also includes cost-reduction capabilities in areas such as energy, shipping, and financial services. To cover these categories alongside tech service review, organizations are often forced to engage two or more vendors. SIB simplifies and consolidates the review process. Solutions within these categories go well beyond negotiating better prices and enforcing contracts. To help organizations in industries such as healthcare, hospitality, and government, SIB offers services to optimize business spending at every level, including providing enriched inventory, sourcing, design, and project management support as well as ongoing reporting, utilization studies, and analytics services. “We pride ourselves in the technology division’s ability to drive value beyond inventory and expense reduction,” explains Warren Reyburn, SIB SVP of Technology. “We have the experience and data to be truly consultative and we want to be both a short-term and longterm partner to our customers.” For 2024, the company is proactively increasing investment in tech enablement efforts to advance today’s available automation and parsing capabilities. This includes promoting new offerings in cloud and SaaS expense management, both areas where corporate overspending has accelerated unchecked in recent years, driven in part by new trends in remote working. SIB recently launched new client portals to improve the wireless, wireline and cloud-expense management experience. A waste and energy management portal stands to follow in 2024. The eventual goal is to consolidate all expenses under a single-pane-of-glass view to drive value, accelerate savings and keep clients better informed. “We remain hyper-focused on growth, including additional strategic M&A, to add depth and diversity to our savings platforms, people and processes,” said Reyburn. “Through our agency and partner programs, we look forward to working alongside industry experts to introduce even more ways in which organizations in all industries can reduce costs and inject operational efficiencies, to enable clients to focus on their core business.” o For additional information on SIB, check out www.aboutsib.com or call (843) 576-3606. SIB Helps End Users, Telecom Carriers ‘Spend Smarter’ through Data Intelligence and Automation Warren Reyburn, SIB SVP of Technology CORE COMMUNICATIONS CHANNELVISION | JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2024
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