The Client:
Acorn Life, an Irish owned life assurance company, offers a comprehensive range of financial products for your life assurance, retirement and investment needs. It distributes its products through a nationwide team of over 200 sales associates. Acorn Life's investment service is also offered through a network of 140 brokers nationwide.

At the end of 2005, Acorn Life had assets of €431 million and premium income was €86 million. Since inception investment performance has consistently been among the market leaders.

The Challenge:
Mobile telecoms spend is about 60 per cent of most companies telecoms bills, however many companies do not know that this can be decreased - in fact bills appear to be increasing rather than decreasing. In this case the client was spending about €300,000 per annum on their mobile telecoms.

The Solution:
MinuteBuyer uses a structured and independent telecoms tender service for negotiating the best rates with mobile operators, to allow firms to leverage their high mobile spend with the various operators. The service guides businesses through the process of calling for competitive tenders from mobile networks. The mobile networks are often willing to bend on price substantially in order to win corporate contracts and, depending on the size of the eventual contract, the savings can be significant.

7 Step Process:
MinuteBuyer manages the process for their clients:

1. Agreeing on the company's mobile needs, taking a snapshot of the firms mobile bills using a mobile audit
2. Building a unique client-specific model with which to go out to tender
3. Issuing requests for information (RFI) from potential vendors
4. Assessing these RFIs to select capable potential vendors
5. Issuing the actual tender specifications, Request for Proposals (RFP) to selected vendors and
6. Evaluating responses and selecting a preferred carrier.
7. Post contract monitoring

MinuteBuyer handles all aspects of the process, freeing up the time and resources that clients typically need to invest when going to tender alone.

The evaluation stage can often be complicated and usually requires a client-specific cost model to be developed. It is frequently difficult to prepare like-for-like rates between mobile networks because all operators have different schemes, price structures, options and presentation of costs. Typically working with a firm's CFO or COO, MinuteBuyer builds a costing model that incorporates all factors including expected usage levels, call patterns, and call types, to accurately compare networks.

Irish businesses should understand that they often have far more power than they realise to reduce their mobile telecoms expenditure. Going out to all mobile providers through a structured tender process can generate substantial savings.

A periodic review is carried out by MinuteBuyer, to ensure that the supplier is meeting all requirements as laid out in their telecoms contract.

MinuteBuyer Fees:
A flat fee is charged for this procurement service, which was agreed at the start of the project. As an independent consultant, no fee is gathered from the mobile operator in a mobile procurement situation.

Cost Saving:
Irish businesses can slash their mobile telecoms expenses by seeking competitive tenders from the major operators. MinuteBuyer has helped leading retail, banking and insurance firms to achieve savings on their mobile phone bills of up to 40 per cent using this process, savings hundreds of thousands of euros. Small and medium-sized businesses can also benefit.

The process described above saved Acorn Life approximately €70,000, simply by MinuteBuyer negotiating the best rate on behalf of their client.