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OUR APPROACH

Our unique approach leverages our deep bench of industry experts to quickly perform commercial and technical analyses, identifying both technical risk and financial opportunity in your current environment.  We understand that internal resource constraints are a significant barrier within most organizations, so we work efficiently with minimal resource requirements from your team to identify an actionable plan for modernization.

While Strongbow part of Accenture customizes each client engagement to meet unique target outcomes, in general our approach follows 3 distinct phases, all of which focus on identifying and unlocking savings to self-fund modernization and innovation.

Opportunity
Assessment

  • Data collection & Discovery

  • Opportunity & Risk Analysis

  • Recommendations Report

Cost
Optimization

  • Demand Rationalization

  • Audit & Optimization

  • Best-in-Class Commercials

Infrastructure
Modernization

  • Continuous Cost Improvement

  • Remediate EOL Risk

  • Improve Speed and Performance

OPPORTUNITY ASSESSMENT

To identify and prioritize opportunities, we’ll analyze your most significant cost drivers in an efficient manner that requires minimal time and resources from your team. We recognize each of our clients have different needs and objectives, so our discovery process is customized based on your unique situation. Phase One may include:

  • Reviewing your financial data, supplier costs, contracts, technology diagrams and other supporting documentation

  • Interviews with key stakeholders to better understand qualitative issues, performance targets, technology requirements, future objectives and in-flight projects

  • An initial recommendations report identifying immediate risk and opportunity with an actionable plan to unlock savings and reduce risk

COST OPTIMIZATION

Strongbow identifies the most effective and efficient ways to reduce costs, improve performance and reduce risk. As a next step, we implement our recommendations to help you achieve the greatest cost efficiencies while improving network performance. We’ll create a highly-detailed implementation plan optimizing key cost drivers for each service at the location or end user level. Phase Two will drive 20 percent+ in OPEX savings within the first few months by leveraging some or all of the following:

  • Improved contract rates, discounts and commercial terms,

  • Elimination of excessive or un-necessary charges,

  • Consolidation of duplicate platforms and services,

  • Customized recommendations that optimize your current usage of metered services and rationalize your consumption model (fixed capital purchase vs XaaS, and vice versa)

To ensure expedient results, we’ll act as an extension of your team, providing program management, project reporting and hands-on assistance to ensure you realize your target outcome quickly.

INFRASTRUCTURE MODERNIZATION

Strongbow forecasts both required investment and savings associated with critical infrastructure improvements to help build self-funding infrastructure modernization programs. With a solid understanding of your legacy infrastructure, we’ll chart a roadmap of additional savings opportunities for the next 12 to 18 months, driving continuous year-over-year cost reduction. We’ll also look for ways to modernize legacy infrastructure, which will not only drive improved cost efficiencies, but improved speed and performance as well.

Some examples of projects that might be included in a longer-term modernization roadmap are:

  • Migration to a single enterprise agreement for UC services, eliminating multiple, duplicate platforms

  • Deploying SD-WAN across the core and edge network to improve reliability and cost performance

  • Migrating legacy applications to the public cloud, eliminating legacy data center infrastructure

  • Optimizing maintenance expenses by identifying and eliminating over-engineering

  • Re-architecting global core connectivity to leverage new cable infrastructure and/or Internet offload