ComTec Consulting (ComTec) stands as a leading provider of telecom and energy cost reduction services, along with associated technology solutions for businesses spanning various industries. One notable client of ComTec is a global energy technology company, which, through both organic growth and acquisitions, has expanded its reach to over twenty domestic and international locations. Like many enterprises, they faced the challenge of efficiently managing their rapidly growing telecom and energy costs due to expansion.

The Company’s executive team focused on driving revenue growth, while the management team was dedicated to ensuring the efficient operation of that growth.

Energy and Telecom Cost Reduction

Managing energy and telecom costs becomes a complex task for businesses with large-scale deployment, especially on a domestic and international scale involving multiple suppliers. The Company’s management recognized the need for a corporate-wide audit and data collection effort encompassing all energy and telecom suppliers, contracts, and production capacity. This effort required an in-depth analysis with recommendations for a strategic way forward. Recognizing the constraints of time, tools, and budget, the Company sought external expertise.

ComTec Consulting was engaged to analyze all global telecom services and domestic energy services for the Company. The goal was to devise a solution to reduce current spending and enhance the long-term management of these significant corporate expense items. Drawing on over 15 years of experience, ComTec Consulting offers a comprehensive cost reduction program for electricity, natural gas, telecom carrier, and telecom systems costs. The ComTec team of cost reduction experts leverage technology, market intelligence, AI, and large-scale buying power to deliver savings directly to their clients’ bottom line.

As a first step, ComTec inventoried all telecom carrier services, hosted voice services, and energy services. They created an executive dashboard for the company’s use, listing all services by entity, location, purpose, and costs. This provided the Company visibility into their entire telecom and energy spend on both macro and micro levels, offering a way to allocate these costs among multiple entities.

Next, based on the provided data and growth projections, the ComTec team collaborated with the Company’s IT team to reconfigure their corporate data network. The aim was to provide more bandwidth where needed and additional redundancy through backup circuits. Special attention was given to complying with regulations for life safety telecom circuits, especially in highly regulated energy production environments. ComTec achieved savings of 18% while implementing additional bandwidth and redundancy for a more efficient corporate network.

In the final step of the cost reduction effort, ComTec utilized its market intelligence and proprietary software to manage the request for proposal process (RFP) to reduce the cost of natural gas and electricity for the Company. ComTec completed RFPs with 30 different providers of electricity and natural gas to compete for the company’s business. Several different electricity products were chosen to mitigate market risk, and ComTec further negotiated with the lowest bidders to achieve a 21% annual savings in a market where energy rates were at historical highs. Using ComTec Systems’ AI-powered Energy Analytics Portal, every vendor’s proposal was scored. ComTec’s market knowledge of each provider’s profit margins provided additional information, which ComTec leveraged to further negotiate with the lowest bidders to achieve a 21% annual savings, in a market where energy rates were at historical highs.

Communication and Connectivity Systems Replacement

As a reliable partner for cloud technology solutions and business infrastructure services, ComTec Systems designs, installs, and manages customized communication solutions tailored to meet each company’s needs.

The Company had previously deployed a hosted VoIP phone system provided by a major US-based telecom company to serve most employees in manufacturing plants and corporate locations. While the hosted telecom system was typical for a company in terms of their size and geographic coverage, the management team was dissatisfied with the high cost and inefficiencies of the solution. Prior to engaging with ComTec, the Company had decided to invest in Microsoft Teams to collaborate and communicate across the enterprise. Despite recognizing the value of Microsoft Teams, maintaining multiple disparate telecom platforms for company communications, both of which had overlapping services, created inefficiencies, increased costs, and led to less productivity for the enterprise.

The decision was made to replace the existing hosted phone system with ComTec’s iConnect2Teams Advanced phone system to empower its enterprise to become more efficient, save costs, and boost production through integration with Microsoft Teams. ComTec System’s iConnect2Teams solution replaces existing phone systems like AVIA, Cisco, RingCentral, and 8×8, with an enterprise-grade VoIP solution that integrates directly with Microsoft Teams.

When iConnect2Teams was integrated into their Microsoft Teams environment, it provided the company with a single platform to bring customer and employee experience together with collaboration, voice, video, chat, and APIs on one cloud-native platform. The hosted and consolidated environment saved implementation time and reduced ongoing maintenance costs. By eliminating the licensing costs, software assurance costs, carrier, maintenance, and other infrastructure costs of the hosted phone system and implementing iConnect2Teams, the Company is saving 11% annually while greatly improving the productivity of the workforce.

On-going Relationship

Looking forward, the company chose to contract with ComTec Systems to provide ongoing managed services that guarantee the preservation of the savings achieved and promise continued additional monthly savings and management of telecom and energy services. This includes ongoing monthly cost analysis, including savings reports, and monthly consultation and management of the services.