Value For Money

Telephones

Reduced telephone call charges by 15%.

Issued council staff with an itemised list of calls from their extension, leading to a significant reduction in calls made. 

Hardware Maintenance

Saved £20,000 a year by changing hardware maintenance levels.

Compared the hardware maintenance arrangements for servers with the business continuity criticality of the applications running on them.  Identified dozens of servers (out of 1,200) with non-critical applications that had the most expensive level of hardware maintenance. 

Duplicate Payments

Saved £32,000 in duplicate payments.

Identified 27 duplicate payments with a total value of over £27,000 during a review at one Primary Care Trust.  Identified 2 duplicate payments with a total value of over £5,000 at a Hospital Trust.

Obsolete / Slow Moving Stock

Stopped inappropriate reordering.

Reviews at council vehicle stores and hospital building maintenance stores identified obsolete and slow moving stock items that were still subject to regular reordering. 

Contract Termination

Terminated an unrequired £1million a year contract.

On own initiative reviewed the necessity of a £1million a year contract to recover systems at a third party site.  Identified that all the systems now had alternative recovery arrangements at a recently established in-house reserve site. 

Negotiated with the supplier to terminate the contract.  Even with an early termination penalty the saving was hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Excessive Controls

Eliminated unnecessary work.

In both local government and the health service reviews of an entire process identified unused controls whereby data was logged and nobody used it, or one department sorted invoices into name order only for another department to sort them by supplier number. 

Obsolete Systems

Saved thousands of pounds in staff, server, maintenance and licence costs by switching off unused computer systems.

In both local government and a utility, reviewed computer system usage and identified systems that were still running even though they were no longer used or had only 1 or 2 sporadic users.

Software Licences

Saved £10,000 a year in software licence maintenance charges.

Reviewed licence conditions and identified that laptops and work PCs at staff homes only required a licence if used at the same time as the desktop machine at work.  Agreed with provider that this applied to only 5% of cases instead of the 100% previously paid for.