Emptoris' Rivermine Telecom Expense Management software and
managed services save many companies and government
agencies MILLIONS of dollars per year.

Fortune 500 Healthcare and Medical Supplies Provider

This Fortune 500 Medical Supplies and Healthcare company has operations in over 100 countries and over 49,000 employees.

The Challenge:
The company spends over $15 million annually on communications expenses and manages over 5,000 mobile devices.  Their communication costs were quickly escalating and the company needed a solution that could help them rein in costs while also automating its entire communications lifecycle for both wireless and wireline assets.  The Healthcare and Medical Supplies company selected Rivermine’s eXPERTSolutions to manage their communications environment.

Post-Rivermine:
Upon implementation of the solution, Rivermine immediately changed almost 2,000 wireless rate plans, eliminating overage charges and removing voice expense charges, resulting in over $167,000 in savings.  Rivermine also initiated a text message optimization project that augmented over 400 text message packages, decreasing the company's messaging costs by 50% despite the fact that the number of messages increased 100%.  Rivermine also converted all of the company's paper invoices into electronic format which enabled complete visibility and control down to the detailed level in the Rivermine system.  To date, Rivermine has delivered nearly $4 million in savings with its automated unified wireline and wireless expense management solution.  The company experienced a return on investment of over 500% in the first year of using Rivermine’s solution.

Fortune 500 Hospitality Company

This Fortune 500 Hospitality Company has over 150,000 employees in 2,800 properties across the globe.

The Challenge:
With over $80 million in annual voice and data spend, the company wanted a solution that could manage their vast number of current communications assets and support growth. Because of technology upgrades and new property openings, The Hospitality company experienced a high volume of new circuit orders as well as disconnects. They wanted a solution capable of keeping an accurate inventory of its equipment and circuits as well as enabling centralized ordering of all communications assets. They also wanted to automatically verify the 2,000 invoices they were receiving from their communications providers each month.  In addition, the company faced escalating costs for their 15,000 mobile devices and needed to optimize their mobile spending.

Results:
When the Hospitality Company first started using Rivermine in 2003, they achieved 100% return on their investment in less than six months while also using the solution to support major company initiatives. Simply by using Rivermine to automatically verify invoice accuracy against existing contracts as well as assets in use, they saved over $500k annually.

The company also used the Rivermine solution to analyze, plan, and optimize their network. The network asset, cost and other data collected using Rivermine was used to support a conversion from a frame relay network to a self-managed VPN network. The Rivermine solution was used to automate many tasks associated with this network conversion including communications asset commissioning, decommissioning, configuring, invoice validation and contract management. Through a combination of the company’s personnel and the Rivermine software, the conversion was completed in half the time that was projected and reduced data network costs by $16 million.

On the mobile side, in 2009 Rivermine helped the company reduce their mobile expenses by over $1.5 million per year in just 60 days – nearly an 800% return on their mobility management investment.  The Rivermine solution helped streamline their voice plans with efficient account pooling, which allowed their properties to maximize sharing capabilities provided by the wireless carriers. By adding efficient text messaging plans, Rivermine helped the company save over $30,000 per month on text charges alone.

Fortune 100 Financial Holding Company

One of the world’s leading financial holding companies, this Fortune 100 Financial Holding Company employs over 222,000 people across 7 major institutions.

The Challenge:
This Financial Holding company manages over $240 million a year in communications expense. They needed a solution to centralize and gain visibility into over 11,000 communications invoices they receive per month, which were time consuming to review and process. The company selected Rivermine’s solution to help identify areas for savings and to alleviate the pain associated with the management of such a significant quantity of monthly invoices.

Results:
Rivermine’s solution helped the company consolidate and manage their over 11,000 monthly invoices in a single solution, providing the company significant gains in efficiency and comprehensive reporting capabilities. With cost reduction as the primary goal, through the Rivermine solution, the financial holding company was able to reconcile their contract rates to the bills and identify erroneous charges. A customer for over 5 years, the company attributes more than $20 million per year in communications savings due to the Rivermine solution.

Sodexo

Sodexo, the $6.3 billion North American division of a global food services and facilities management company, employs 125,000 remote workers. Roughly 5,000 of its U.S. employees have cell phones, handheld wireless devices, pagers and air cards.

The Challenge:
Sodexo was having difficulties keeping track of how its employees were using mobile devices and how much they were spending.

Post-Rivermine:
Sodexo has been able to reduce wireless spending by 25%. Sodexo has deactivated approximately 500 unused or barely used mobile phones, it now has a near-complete inventory of all its wireless devices, and it can continuously analyze wireless device usages to ensure it is always using the most financially advantageous rate plan.

Excerpt from 2006 Baseline Magazine Article 'Taming the Wireless Beast'

Fortune 500 Internet Portal Company

Over 500 million users worldwide use this Internet Portal Company on a daily basis and they employ over 13,000 employees across 20 business segments.

The Challenge:
This Internet Portal Company had very little visibility into the usage and cost of their 3,000 mobile devices and managing the international call usage was a challenge. The company selected Rivermine’s mobile enterprise solution to address these issues.

Results:
Rivermine’s mobile solution has helped the company reduce their overall expenses and enabled them to efficiently manage their devices.  Optimizing their rate plans including removal of underutilized international plans, within 6 months, their international cost per minute was reduced by 50%.  In domestic spend, Rivermine helped deliver a 47% reduction in cost per minute. The company has realized over $1 million in savings and a 100% return on investment in less than 1 year.

Ford Motor Company

Ford Motor Company is a $118 billion company on the Fortune 100 List. They operate around the world in both the automotive and financial service business segments.

The Challenge:
As part of an overall initiative to streamline its internal business using the Web, Ford wanted a solution that could simplify the reallocation of IT and telecom costs. The goal for Ford was to create a single internal IT bill, allowing managers to easily access cost and consumption information for their departments.

Post-Rivermine:
With the new system, more than 1,500 Ford managers have the ability to view aggregate IT costs broken down into various categories, such as Telecom, Computer/Network Services, etc. They can then drill down into each category to see additional detail. This allows for easy verification of costs and identification of abnormalities or mistakes. Based on this project with Ford, Rivermine developed this updated solution and released it generally as Chargeback.

Fortune 1000 Manufacturing Company

As the world's largest independent channel for document management systems and services, this manufacturing company supports over 25,000 employees and over 400 locations worldwide.

The Challenge:
The company was faced with millions of dollars in growing communications bills, and needed a telecom management solution that could help cut telecom costs and handle thousands of invoices and inventory for over 100,000 lines and individual expenses. The company’s internal billing processes were decentralized and handled manually, making it impossible to capture and leverage company-wide communications costs.  The company selected Rivermine’s software solution to automate the company’s entire communications lifecycle, including contract sourcing, ordering, inventory management, invoice processing and auditing, and reporting and analytics.

Post-Rivermine:
Rivermine’s centralized solution immediately gave the manufacturing company a comprehensive view of its entire communicaitons spend by technology, vendor, region, office, and carrier.  It streamlined invoice processing which enabled the company to reassign 80% of its communications support staff to other higher-priority projects.  Rivermine’s solution reduced their monthly invoices by 4,200, saving the company over $180K in monthly processing costs.  The Rivermine solution has delivered over $4 million in annual savings and more than $15 million to date.  As a result of Rivermine’s solution, the company reported a return on investment of over 100% in the first year.