The Solution

Redlands Community Hospital contacted Corilate to assist with their telecom contract negotiations.  The vendor contract had language that extended the entire contract every time any service was changed.  Our recommendation was to understand what they had first before changing vendors or contracting for additional services.

 

Our first task was to create a baseline billing inventory, by facility, of all telecom services being paid for by the hospital by reverse engineering and normalizing a full months worth of telecom invoices.  Next, Corilate completed a call through test of all known phone numbers and verified what each was for and documented the results in their datastore. This process took about 4 weeks and created a well defined list of services that the hospital was paying for based on vendor invoices. 

Over the following six weeks Corilate built a physical inventory of services being delivered by their telecom vendors.  This entailed working with the hospitals PBX vendor to assist Corilate in documenting and taking digital photos of each telephone room, also known as the Minimum Point of Entry (MPOE) , determining what services were delivered from each vendor, if each was operational, what jack and pin location they were connected to on the hospitals orange blocks and what each service connected to internally such as voice/data fax, modems, PBX, internet etc. 

 

Additionally, all standing telecom contracts were located, reviewed and key contract issues were notated by Corilate staff including start and end dates so management could be prepared in advance of contract renewals.

Next, Corilate compared the billing inventory to the physical inventory and identified services that appeared to be disconnect candidates.  Based on experience, Corilate historically knows that 20% to 40% of installed telecom services are not required, not connected, or are billing incorrectly. Working with Redlands telecom vendors, Corilate began issuing orders to safely remove services that were no longer needed or weren't connected at their MPOE locations, did a traffic analysis to look at capacity requirements and began right sizing key services based on need. Finally, Corilate consolidated billing accounts into logical groups to reduce accounting paperwork, finalized contract negotiations and got an account manager assigned to the hospital from their main telecom vendor.

The Result

After six months, Corilate had documented Redlands entire telecommunications environment and in the process disconnected 81 telecom services saving the hospital $134,000 per year in fixed recurring telecom costs and obtained an additional $53,000 in one time service credits for billing corrections.  

Redlands CFO,  Sabi Dadabhai, asked the same question three times “does everything still work?”  Everything was working,  including fewer invoices to pay from accounting each month thanks to the account consolidations and no phone bill for six months due to the credits.  He then went on to say that we had “just saved two nurses jobs in the middle of the economic downturn.”.