Scott Leibs, CFO Magazine
February 21, 2006

Reducing Costs

This article is right on the money. As part of Expense Reduction Analysts, I work with SMBs to help them reduce overhead costs in areas like office supplies, small package freight, and merchant card fees. I often hear and see that controllers and other stake holders are threatened by an external expert coming in to "do their job". The reality is that they are stretched to their limits and don't often know what they should be paying for these services, nor does the CFO expect that they should have specialized knowledge and benchmarks for every overhead category. I save client an average of 20% on cost categories I review and you would think that would open the door, but alas many are unable to see past their pride.

Posted by john heiden | Feb 25, 2006 9:08 AM ET

More Information

We can help lower costs. For more information about Software Contract Solutions, Inc. please contact Joel Dupzyk at
joel@softwarecontractsolutions.com

Posted by Joel Dupzyk | Feb 2, 2006 10:16 AM ET

More on the topic

Thank you for quoting me in the article. After I spoke to your journalist I wrote this blog linked below titled Putting Strategic Back in Strategic Technology Sourcing

http://dealarchitect.typepad.com/deal_architect/2005/12/putting_strateg.html

As I say there are many reasons why corporations do tech negotiations on their own (without outside advisory help) - but the reality is the average corporation while most technology vendors make much more - with software vendors almost 90% gross margin on their annual maintenance. For every dollar in technology spend, buyers of raw material or other indirect procurement have to severely beat down those vendors to average out the high margins in technology spend.

The next few years are a golden opportunity for CFOs/CIOs to beat down incumbent, "utility" IT spend from 70% to 30% of their IT budgets. Never in my 20 year IT career have I seen so many options from software as a service, offshore development, open source, VoIP, cheap broadband to incumbent vendors, third party software maintenance vendors.

Even if corporations do not migrate to these newer options, they allow a huge opportunity to go back and banchmark and re-negotiate current technology spend. It is still is the biggest single capital item for most companies.

Posted by Vinnie Mirchandani | Feb 2, 2006 9:02 AM ET

NPI

For more information on NPI or to discuss this article, please contact us at solutions@npifinancial.com.

Posted by Todd Wolff | Feb 1, 2006 9:49 AM ET