Calero-MDSL Delivers Savings, Visibility, and Control for Major Healthcare Equipment Provider

A leading provider of home medical equipment that serves several million patients each year reached out to Calero-MDSL when its current partner just wasn’t delivering. The company uses the Calero-MDSL Telecom Expense Management (TEM) platform across its expansive and continually changing environment.

“We provide support wherever our clients need it — we are always moving!” noted a spokesperson for the home medical equipment provider. “My team meets weekly with our real estate group to make sure that the telecom infrastructure is in place, for both data and voice, wireline and wireless. Despite the volatility of our infrastructure, Calero-MDSL has been instrumental in helping to identify and track our inventory, resulting in multimilliondollar savings for us.”

Challenges

With telco-related expenses originally running at $25M per annum, even small percentage improvements in costs can result in significant bottom-line returns. The existing TEM solution struggled to provide accurate insights into the company’s communications landscape. Even before the global pandemic, keeping up with the locations and usage of the company’s highly mobile workforce was extremely demanding.

“We just couldn’t reconcile our inventories or usage with what the providers were telling us,” the telecom spokesperson said. “It was just impossible to try to manage the situation. With COVID-19, most of our thousands of onshore and offshore personnel began working from home. Almost overnight we had to get everyone on to a VPN and provide support for equipment in thousands of employees’ houses, as well as our facilities that remained open. All our call centers became virtual. Overall, it was very challenging!”

In addition to the provisioning and setup expenses, there was a hidden cost associated with the change of locations.

The spokesperson shared, “With each move, employees call-forwarded their phones — with many making multiple hops — and we were charged an additional fee for every single one. We very quickly had thousands of forwarded phones that we needed to correlate and manage against our telecom contracts and invoices.”

“I get incredibly good data from the platform — we now believe our reports! The visibility it delivers has enabled us to right-size every location; resulting in the removal of many thousands of lines. We couldn’t have done this without Calero-MDSL.”

– Spokesperson, Major Healthcare provider

Solution

The company rebuilt its inventory by deploying the Calero-MDSL telecom expense management solution and leveraging Wireline, Call Accounting, and Invoice Management. “With Calero-MDSL my team can view accurate diagrams of our telecom footprint for each location. We now know where all the circuits and circuit IDs are located: This alone has been a colossal step forward in efficiently managing our environment.”

The company representative continued, “The platform delivers extremely precise data that my team constantly leverages. I can roll up this information to create justifications to present to my CIO and CFO supporting our telecom roadmap and budget. Much of the heavy-lifting my team used to endure to verify that billings were correct has been removed. Now they can focus on higherimpact tasks that directly support our operations.”

Now, the company’s telecom group can monitor phone lines by each provider and hold them accountable for their contracts.

Results

In three years, Calero-MDSL has been a key contributor in assisting the healthcare equipment provider to reduce total annual telecom costs from $25M down to $19M, by providing the visibility needed to make informed decisions.

“I get incredibly good data from the platform — we now believe our reports! The visibility it delivers has enabled us to right-size every location, resulting in the removal of many thousands of lines,” according to the company representative.

“We’ve also been able to use Calero- MDSL to make behavioral changes across the organization, including educating our general managers on how to optimize telecom usage and expenditures at their location. Examples include avoiding offering a legacy 1-800 number, when a direct line to a patient is cheaper, more convenient, and faster.” The healthcare equipment provider also is supporting many new telehealth initiatives implemented by healthcare providers during the pandemic, which involves using Calero-MDSL to track the many thousands of mobile devices — such as cell phones and iPads — now deployed.

“The iPads are used by patients to remotely sign medical forms and spare them from making an in-facility visit. We know exactly how many devices we have and where they are located.”