Small Business Training - COVID-19 Crisis Management

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The current health and economic climate will require all organizations to examine current expenditures, whether they be capital (CapEx) or operational expense (OpEx) in nature.

Beyond a reduction in discretionary spending, there are a few levers you can pull to curtail your current spend rates. These include initiating a war on waste, SaaS optimization, public cloud IaaS optimization, contractor or third-party hourly rate review, and analysis of existing projects for critical impact.

Let’s examine each of the above levers and how they may favorably affect your short-term budget.

 

War on Waste

 

Examine your operational expenditures beyond discretionary spending. There will be low-hanging fruit where cuts can obviously be made, such as travel, conferences, and meetings. For example, most organizations are eliminating ordering breakfast and lunch for meetings.

Looking beyond the obvious, expense reductions can be achieved by performing housekeeping activities such as:

• Examine company-provided mobile phone usage to ensure those employees who have phones are using them. Disconnect terminated employees and contractors and optimize your plans to align with usage patterns.

• Perform a telecommunication audit for utilization, optimization, and rate reviews to reduce operational cost without operational impact.

• Evaluate your hardware maintenance agreements. Consolidate vendors wherever there is overlap, for example, if you have more than one reseller for SmartNet maintenance. Also look for overpayment for retired assets and migration of post-warranty maintenance to third-party providers.