About the Client

mariotMarriott International, Inc. is a leading hospitality company, with more than 3,800 properties, 19 brands and franchised properties around the world. Guided by the Marriott family’s leadership for more than 80 years, the company is headquartered in Maryland, US.

Business Challenges

  • Due to lot of responsibilities, the CFO and telecom admins lacked requisite domain experience for managing telecom spending and procurement, being mostly Chartered Accountants with financial backgrounds.
  • Unfavorable terms and conditions were being signed with vendors when negotiating for telecom inventory because each hotel property was operating in a silo.
  • Market floor rate plans across different locations were unknown among them.
  • Calculating chargebacks for outbound calls was difficult because of the lack of tools to distinguish between hotel guest calls and internal admin calls, and because bills were blindly paid without analysis, auditing or validation.
  • The procurement team faced challenges in demand management, forecasting usages and bandwidth planning for the hotel guest and admin teams.
  • Asset tracking (BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad and data cards) was not in place and was hardly updated by HR to distinguish between guests and employees.
  • The wireless policy was hard to enforce because of the confusion in identifying needed value-added services versus unnecessary add-on packs, which sometimes were unknowingly activated by service providers without the consent of employees, resulting in employees inadvertently bearing the cost against their reimbursement limits and then complaining about it.
  • The central mobility procurement team never had usage statistics (i.e. spending trends) on hand when negotiating carrier contracts and only talked to vendors about fixed commitments.
  • The organization incurred costs anywhere from 25% to 55% higher than necessary.

Intellibuzz’s solutionjw_1

  • Intellibuzz’s aggregated buying power helped hotels get market rates according to fair usage
  • Generated and submitted vendor comparison reports to procurement teams for demand management and for determining capacity utilization
  • Mapping user data to assets helped the finance and HR departments reallocate unused assets (rotating SIM cards, data cards, etc.) according to data from HR
  • MIS reports on wireless highlighted needed and unneeded value-added services and educated the team on activating and deactivating the add-on packs for employees, thereby enforcing mobile policy

 Business Benefits

  • Self-funded project with contingency-based pricing structure achieved a ROI of more than 150%
  • Telecom expense reduction resulted in savings of:
    • up to 53% on wireline,
    • 13% on wireless,
    • 15% on data.
  • Thousand of dollars saved from asset-tracking strategy.
  • Centralized procurement for 3 hotel properties
    • Annual savings of $83,000 in just 6 months