Global Telecommunications Optimisation for a Multinational with Offices on 4 Continents

The client was a multinational in the industrial engineering sector with 18 operational offices distributed across Europe (7 offices), Latin America (4 offices), Asia (5 offices) and Africa (2 offices). The company had grown primarily through acquisitions, which had generated a completely fragmented telecommunications map: each office managed its own contracts with local providers, with no central coordination.

The result was operational and economic chaos. Eleven different providers, with contracts in different languages, currencies and validity phases. No centralised visibility of spend or service quality. No homogeneous SLAs or incident escalation protocols. The global IT director estimated that his team was spending 30% of its time managing telecommunications problems that, in many cases, they could not resolve because they depended on local providers with whom they had no direct relationship.

Productivity losses were quantifiable: the analysis we conducted in the diagnostic phase identified 847 critical incidents in the previous 12 months, with an average resolution time of 4.2 hours and an estimated cost of €380,000 in lost productivity. Additionally, the consolidated annual spend of €2.1M was 35-40% higher than would have been appropriate for a company of that size with efficient management.

The project began with a full audit of the company's telecommunications map: inventory of all contracts, analysis of real spend by office and service category, measurement of historical service quality and interviews with IT managers at each office to understand real needs and most frequent problems.

The diagnosis revealed that the needs of each office were very different: European offices required high-capacity connectivity for design and simulation applications; Latin American offices had fibre availability problems in some locations and needed hybrid solutions; Asian offices had specific security and local regulatory compliance requirements; and African offices operated in environments with very limited infrastructure.

This diversity of needs was the starting point for the architecture design: not a single solution for all, but a unified architecture in its management and governance but adapted in its implementation to the real needs of each region. The guiding principle was the same that guides all of LFGD's IT consulting: the right solution for each problem, not the same solution for all problems.

The tender process was conducted with 7 global operators with the capacity to provide service in all 4 regions. The winning proposal was a framework contract with a primary operator for European and Latin American offices, and managed service agreements with two specialised regional operators for Asia and Africa, all under a centralised management platform that gave the global IT team real-time visibility of all offices.

The economic impact was immediate and significant. Annual telecommunications spend was reduced from €2.1M to €1.35M, a saving of 36% representing €750,000 per year. This saving was achieved despite improving service quality at all offices, thanks to the negotiating power generated by volume consolidation and the elimination of duplications and unnecessary services identified during the audit.

The number of providers was reduced from 11 to 3, which radically simplified operational management. The global IT team went from spending 30% of its time managing telecommunications problems to 8%, freeing up capacity for higher-value strategic projects.

Critical incidents were reduced by 71% in the first six months of operation of the new architecture. Average resolution time fell from 4.2 hours to 1.1 hours thanks to contractual SLAs and defined escalation protocols. The centralised monitoring platform also allowed 35% of incidents to be proactively detected and resolved before they affected users.