Quickcomm finds a Place in Inc. 5000′s Ranking

BACKGROUND

Alcan is the world’s second largest producer of primary aluminum, a technology leader in this sector, as well as a leading manufacturer and distributor of aluminum rolled products.  Alcan is a dynamic, multilingual and multicultural organization with approximately 88,000 employees in 58 countries and regions worldwide.  With its head office in Montreal, Canada, Alcan is a public company traded on the Toronto, New York, London, Paris and Swiss stock exchanges with 2006 revenues of $23.6 billion.

Alcan’s North American telecommunications spend in 2007 was $5 million and growing continually.   Prior to purchasing a telecom expense management solution, Alcan had no formal process or group responsible for managing the telecom infrastructure. In turn, corporate policy was not enforceable and employees were held unaccountable. If an employee left the company, the change was rarely communicated to the appropriate group.

“Without a centralized solution in place, invoices were received and paid without being validated and analyzed for discrepancies or errors. Inventory wasn’t being properly tracked and contracts weren’t being optimized”, noted Regis Gagnon, IT Infrastructure-Project Manager.

Realizing there were telecom services being under-utilized and unaccounted for, upper management became conscience of the growing expenses and sought out a solution that would provide increased visibility and better control over the expenditures. With limited resources dedicated to managing the telecom expenditure, Alcan’s management team was unsure that they would be able to gain control of the infrastructure.

SOLUTION

In 2006, Alcan released an RFP to seven leading TEM providers, offering managed service, BPO, and ASP model solutions.   Through the responses and meetings with TEM providers, Alcan became increasingly confident they could manage their telecom expenses internally with the help of a centralized application.   Upon meeting with Quickcomm and viewing its leading TEM application, they determined that the software provided detailed inventory management, invoice validation, usage analysis and dispute management in one centralized database.  Of equal importance, Quickcomm provided the necessary reporting that would give upper management the control and visibility needed to make proactive decisions.

In the end, Alcan saw that Quickcomm was the only true global solution able to support their requirements. Quickcomm had over 300 electronic global billing readers available that included ability to read Alcan’s French invoices electronically.  Quickcomm also provided a project manger that would provide a French-speaking front end for support.

“Le fait qu’ils pouvaient fournir un gestionnaire de projet qui parlait français démontrait leur dévouement au succès de ce projet.”

Translation : “The fact that they could provide a French speaking project manager showed their dedication to making this project a success.“

The implementation process validated Alcan’s decision to choose Quickcomm.  During the implementation, Quickcomm assisted Alcan in consolidating all of their invoices and accounts.   Quickcomm worked with the vendors to convert Alcan’s paper invoices to electronic for all of their major carriers.  The professional services group worked hand-in-hand with Alcan to draft a process enabling them to centralize and maintain all day-to-day telecom management.

OUTCOME

Within the first 90 days of the project, hundreds of wireless devices tied to people no longer with Alcan were uncovered.  In addition, the system exposed a large number of devices being billed on the wrong plan.  Rectifying these errors generated over $700,000 in savings on wireless devices alone.  By proactively managing their inventory going forward, Alcan is assured that errors like these won’t happen in the future.

The new TEM solution has been a success in satisfying everyone from administrators to management and in between.  There is a streamlined process in place now allowing administrators to maintain the process rather than scramble to put out fires. The time required to process invoices and provisioning requests has been reduced by 30%.  The reports produced by Quickcomm have become a critical part of management planning.  With Quickcomm, management now has the visibility required to enforce a corporate policy across the organization.

The Quickcomm solution gave Alcan a centralized repository to house all of the carrier and contract information. Once Alcan had the ability to identify all of the wireless plans being used, they were finally able to analyze their carrier volumes.  From there, it was determined that they weren’t optimizing the current contracts.   This exercise gave Alcan the leverage needed to negotiate better contracts.  Specifically, they were able provide trending information to Telus and negotiate a stronger wireless contract then they previously had with Bell Mobility for all of Alcan’s mobility services.

“The growth of our company and the dynamic nature of telecom made the management of our infrastructure far more complex than ever before,” said Regis Gagnon at Alcan Inc. “Quickcomm’s easy to use software solution gives us the level of insight and visibility we need to ensure that we received the greatest return on our telecom investments.“

Quickcomm was initially purchased to handle 5 major aluminum plants and several smaller sites’ telecom spend. Due to the success of the initial implementation, Quickcomm is scheduled to be deployed at the remaining Quebec sites, doubling the original scope of work.

“The first phase of this project was such a success.  We are excited to see what else we uncover when we implement the solution across our entire organization. It will be great to continue to pass these savings back to our shareholders.”