Recently, Ayudar conducted a strategy review of telecoms for an IT company operating across nine sites in seven European countries including Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK. The brief was to review telephone activity and provide analysis of call profiles across each site to determine if VoIP would be suitable for the company and, in addition, to carry out a benchmark comparison of charges.

The project involved understanding telephone bills in seven different languages from nine different service providers for land lines and a further eight providers for mobile phones.

The analysis demonstrated that contrary to the company’s senior management belief, each site operated very much as a stand alone unit with minimal telephone traffic between sites and with minimal traffic between countries with the exception of three sites on which it was demonstrated that VoIP technologies would be beneficial.

The review went on to demonstrate that negotiating pan-European contracts from a single provider instead of using separate providers in each country would provide savings of around 20%, equating to an annual saving of around €50,000 on landlines and a further €68,000 per year saving on mobile charges.

Tender documents were subsequently produced and a pan-European tender exercise completed.