Background
A UK government entity and its partners engaged Wavestone for support in establishing an effective go-to-market strategy for the future procurement of WAN services. The strategy included advice on improving performance (especially in remote sites), reducing circuit costs, and ensuring the network is future-proof over the next 5 years.
What did Wavestone deliver?
Wavestone reviewed the current network landscape through an in-depth analysis of services by holding interviews with the key stakeholders.
Focusing particularly on potential operating model approaches, Wavestone combined their knowledge of the global supplier marketplace with the client’s existing requirements to produce a WAN network strategy. The strategy had to deliver value for money, simplified management, and flexibility for changing needs, whilst staying aligned to the IT Strategy.
Wavestone then lead workshops with the client to establish target solutions in terms of design, operating model, and sourcing frameworks to establish a strategic roadmap. These recommendations were then played back to stakeholders to ensure full agreement and buy-in.
For the final deliverable, Wavestone consolidated the knowledge gained from the stakeholder workshops and provided an unbiased perspective of the WAN supplier market.
Key Challenges
In Wavestone’s process analysis of the client’s current environment, multiple shortfalls in the existing solution were discovered. Existing services were inflexible, overly complex, had limited ability to optimise costs, and did not focus on continuous improvement.
In order to overcome these challenges, Wavestone recommended the client to take a disaggregated approach to their operating model and provided detailed circuit price estimates for all regions and sites in which the client is located.
The client required a more flexible, less complex framework to enable dynamic and cost-effective delivery of connectivity and Wavestone provided them with a solution which would achieve this.
Results
The project delivered a successful strategy to the client within a tight timeline that demonstrated clear benefits to overcome their current challenges that stemmed from using a single supplier. As the strategy presented various operating model options along with Wavestone’s recommended approach, within the constraints of government procurement procedures, the client now has detailed insight into available paths for future procurements.
The strategy also gave the client suggestions on how to improve their WAN services for remote sites by leveraging multiple circuits. The client has now decided to adopt a new procurement approach aligned to the recommendations made by Wavestone.
