Ways to Cut Costs on IT Procurement

While e-mail is a convenient way to communicate, it’s not the best medium for communicating back and forth in a question and answer format. For that, you need to use the telephone. Dial a vendor’s number and the chase is on! Multiply missed calls and dueling voice mail messages by the number of vendors in the procurement process and pretty soon getting specifications and an idea of price becomes a full-time job.

Many IT procurement personnel are not aware of complex pricing matrixes that are specification-driven as well as item quantity driven. Hidden IT procurement savings like these can usually only be realized when the procurement department works with a tech-savvy partner who assists in the process of preparing HP quotes on the organization’s behalf.

Asset Management is the key to the control and reduction of costs. Keep a continuous and accurate update on ALL the IT assets that you have in your organisation. This includes hardware, Software, licences etc AND the location of the said Asset. This should also include a log of the approximate usage of the same. ALL incoming requests for new assets should be evaluated by the Capital Assets Committee against this list. You may be surprised to see how many duplicates there are that are being sparingly used. How maybe 2 drawing departments, sitting almost side-by-side both want to order large expensive printers A0 size for printing at-most 5 drawings a day.(This was a real incident in my previous company). Use of strict Asset Management and Control will largely reduce costs AND keep for you an accurate inventory of your items. This will also be useful when you want to "retire" older PCs in favour of newer ones.