Streamlined mobile device operations and added cost savings with MetTel Managed Mobility and IoT.
Private equity firm finds $10M savings to scale across its portfolio.
Customer
This global private firm equity firm maintains 360 investments in 41 countries. Their portfolio includes financial, retail, healthcare, industrial, and manufacturing companies, including Lululemon Athletica, Serta Simmons Bedding, Vantiv, and TransUnion.
The firm aims to make constructive contributions to their portfolio companies. Consequently, they have become savvy in ways to redesign and upgrade an organization's infrastructure and IT systems to accelerate revenue and earnings growth.
Challenge
Like so many others, this private equity firm's portfolio companies were experiencing a business downtick heading into spring 2020.
For example, one of their retail companies, the world's leading mattress brand Serta Simmons Bedding (Serta), was hit especially hard. Due to COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders across the U.S., the majority of retailers selling Serta's mattresses were forced to close their doors for several months and Serta sales came to a halt.
The firm needed to find ways to introduce efficiencies to Serta, as well as across their portfolio.
Solution
In response, the private equity firm looked for areas of operational savings across their companies. Working with MetTel, they identified mobility programs as an opportunity to introduce operational and administrative efficiencies. The firm began their MetTel cost savings program with the particularly hard-hit company, Serta.
As a national organization, Serta's mobility plan included multiple vendors, carriers, and technology partners. Not only were the logistics of vendor management a nightmare (multiple vendor portals, invoices, contracts, account managers, support teams, etc.) but it was difficult for Serta's IT org to see the big picture of network performance and costs. How could they cut unnecessary spending when they weren't sure where they were spending?
MetTel's Managed Mobility solutions put an end to the hassle of managing multiple wireless vendor relationships. Instead, Serta maintained their regional services but moved to one contract with MetTel which they managed via the MetTel Portal. In addition to moving to one contract with national coverage, Serta took advantage of additional MetTel programs, including Lifecycle, Deploy, and Protect.
To get started with savings, the firm took advantage of MetTel's unique full lifecycle program, including device leasing. This device management program allowed Serta to upgrade to the latest devices at a reduced cost. Also, at the end of the devices life, the program ensured that devices are securely wiped and responsibly disposed of.
After leasing, Serta's 1,200 new devices were provisioned through MetTel's Deploy plan using robotic process automation (RPA). Typically, a company's IT team would spend five hours on the seven-step staging process per device. Instead, Serta offloaded this time-consuming IT staff task to MetTel, providing additional wage savings to Serta.
Once shipped, MetTel Deploy provided sourcing and logistics, managed unified endpoint management, security, and financial and program management. Also, Serta's devices were protected through MetTel's Protect program. This program provided an overnight replacement for broken devices and full wipes of broken assets.
The Serta team was able to use the MetTel Portal as the new single-source-of-truth for mobility administration. With hierarchy-based access, the Portal provides the ability to view spending/billing information across all their portfolio companies. They relied upon the platform's AI to automatically identify any unusual spending patterns, automatically suspend unused lines, and proactively monitor invoices. The platform even took action to ensure there were no data overages.
Through managed mobility, an-easy-to-use management platform, and device provisioning, MetTel was able to provide Serta with $31K in monthly savings. The MetTel Managed Mobility program cut Serta's mobility costs by 48% for a $1.1M in term savings. But, this is only the start. The global private equity firm was able to scale these savings across their portfolio across several different industries for a total of $10M in savings.