Revenues are stagnating and competition is growing ever fiercer in the telecom sector. With growth from traditional services and ARPUs slowing down, telecoms have no choice but to seek profitability improvement through cost optimization and innovation. However, after years of protracted and heavy-handed tactical negotiations with key suppliers, major telcos are fast approaching the point of diminishing returns. The key to unlocking incremental savings lies in reducing post-signature leakage across the strategic supply base (especially for complex services such as IT, network and infrastructure, BPO and logistics services), an area which has been historically neglected.

Recent industry studies from IACCM, EY and KPMG have estimated as much as 15-20% value leakage in annual strategic spend due to ineffective governance of complex services suppliers. Given the overall shift in spend distribution over the last two decades towards buying more complex services as opposed to vanilla goods or commodities, reducing this leakage by even 20% could improve overall EBITDA by over 5%. Procurement leaders who have implemented Sirion added $70 million to the bottom-line through improved supplier governance in the last 12 months.