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Environment, Social and Governance is making a difference to the world by your business. While large businesses have started accounting this as part of their strategy, its high time for Small, Medium Businesses (SMB) to share their contribution.

ESG is often looked as a theory, whereas it's a commitment to create a brighter future for generations to come. Migrating or transforming from on-premise to Cloud Services can help businesses achieve their ESG goals. Cloud offers reduced operating costs, agility and easy access to data and applications which can help SMB's to achieve their ESG goals.

SMB's should start setting ESG goals as part of their on-going strategy so that it can create sustained outcomes that drive value and fuel growth simultaneously creating a strong eco-friendly environment.

Adapting ESG strategy for SMB's will be a challenge as they will be striving hard to increase their revenue as well as Operating Margin for their businesses. Digital transformation is one of the space where SMB's can focus on ESG and Corvanta Analytics will be able to guide on it. Please reach us at analytics@corvanta.io to discuss more.

Aligning with ESG strategy is adapting to a changing world. Success is not only increasing your revenue or operating margin, its also creating a future for generations to come.

Pricing is the act of establishing what an IT vendor should be paid for a piece of work. The price should be based on the value the vendor creates for the business. Pricing is the most critical driver of Operating Margin. A 1% increase in price will result in a greater decrease in Operating Margin than a 1% increase in revenue.
Pricing is impacted by the below parameters:
1. Segmentation of Services: Is the price provided by the vendor separated by type of work of offering
2. Market Standards: How is the offering or type of work currently being priced in the marketplace. Is the Offering commoditized within the market
3. Solution: Is the solution provided by the vendor in line with the scope of services requested. What additional levers have been solutionized by the vendor
4. Competitive Vendors: Are other companies providing the same solution
5. Differentiators: What differentiates the vendor from other competitors. How is the price reflecting the differentiation

There are various pricing models for vendor sourcing. The most commonly used pricing models in the industry are,

1. Time & Material (Rate Card)
2. Fixed Pricing

1. Time & Material (Rate Card):
This is a straightforward pricing type with a high degree of transparency with the IT service provider with respect to time & expenses incurred. Billing by the vendor will be based on the effort clocked.
A rate card details the rates IT vendor will charge the businesses for a defined scope of services and can be designed in many different combinations.
Fees for the services are priced and billed on an hourly basis.

Advantages of a Rate Card Model Pricing:

⊙ Allows better budgetary planning and financial certainty
⊙ Provides an easy reference point to negotiate cost with the IT vendor
⊙ No committed volume to the IT service provider
⊙ IT service provider cannot increase the rates just like that
Cons of Rate Card Model:
⊙ Risk is fully owned by the business
⊙ Less incentive for the IT service provider to be efficient as there is no committed volume.
Fixed Pricing:

Fees are fixed for a defined scope of work. Fees are agreed initially between IT service provider and business for a defined scope of services. Fees are provided by the IT vendor in a billing schedule to reflect the timing of invoicing. Usually, fixed fees are invoiced in regular intervals (e.g. monthly or quarterly) and will be calculated based on total project fees or total yearly fees.

Advantages of a Fixed Pricing Model:

⊙IT service provider bears the risk if unable to deliver successfully as per the Service Level Agreements
⊙No fluctuating cost or resource addition, all have to be borne by the IT service provider
⊙IT service provider can be more efficient as the scope of services has to be closed within a fixed fee.

Cons:

⊙No visibility on the cost incurred for IT service provider
⊙More governance required to coordinate with the IT service provider teams.

Consider digitization as a means of increasing productivity rather than providing everyone with a computer. Integrating your business with CRM should not be viewed as keeping a record of customers, but rather as expanding the customer base and learning more about the customer. If you read in an article that Internet penetration has increased, your mind should not process the fact that everyone is using the internet, but rather that market penetration has increased.

No matter what business you perform in, whether retail, fashion, finance, or supply chain, IT will have an impact on your business. The absence of Information technology is similar to the absence of electricity in manufacturing. Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, and Netflix outperformed Hertz, Marriott, Walmart, and HBO by implementing a digital business model.

Companies that examine their IT system efficiently outperform laggards in almost every industry in

1. Revenue growth

2. Increase in operating profit

3. Customer satisfaction.

They defined their RCA properly.

What exactly is RCA?

Requirement: State your requirements, such as increasing sales by 5% year on year, increasing market share by 10%, and reducing office costs by 7%.

Challenges: Common challenges include an increased ticket rate, the complexity of integrating multiple applications, and the difficulty in obtaining realistic metrics. Investors frequently focus on how rather than what.

Action: Determine the number of tickets you should have in terms of L1.5, L2, and L3. Compare your system to industry norms. Determine the user-based ticket rate. Utilize optimization levers to find ways to improve your system.

Do you take IT tickets seriously? Most small and medium businesses do not.

Why is it important to track and resolve IT tickets in a systematic manner?

Let me explain. Imagine you are running a small business of 50 employees and 4 machines. If you faced a hardware issue, the machine may or may not work for 2 days. (In case of emergency you can always shift the load to another machine although that can be time consuming)

Discuss in detail with different stakeholders to gain consensus on what hardware needs to be replaced and at what time it must be done

It's not an easy task considering different stakeholders have their own agendas. Some (like customer who ordered) wants immediate resolution while others may not. This can sometimes delay the resolution substantially and even in the worst-case some employees may lose productivity without any workable machine for more than 48 hours!

Your IT tickets to create same amount of disruption like this. But businesses do not take it as serious as other bugs.

Let us see a case of MENA(Middle East North America) based machinery spare parts suppliers with revenue of US $1.2 million. Their clients are spanning across different countries and they are following nonsystematic ordering pattern. This made their reliance on their ERP systems high and they followed a policy of holding minimum inventory only.

First of all the base price of their IT system itself is more than the industry price. Initially they spent 7% of their revenue on IT support along with 12% of their functioning time as IT maintenance.

When they approached corvanta analytics to find any way for optimizing their existing system due to decrease in profit.

We performed our analysis and found that their IT system is not on their standard, Ticket price is much higher than industry standard and Average Resolution Time never met proposed time.

This MENA based supplier optimized their system tour proposed benchmark in less than a Quarter and now projected an increase in revenue of whooping 11.61%.

As a matter of fact, many companies undermine the evaluation of intangible assets impact on their business. Large players like Boeing, General Motors spend millions in optimizing their existing system by analyzing and ensuring that it meets the standard.

The second thing they do is keep track of the tickets that are generated in their system and the time it takes to resolve them.

We corvanta analytics using our innovative method analyze your IT system and give detailed report for $99. We won't stop there; on demand, you may acquire a ticket management platform for both internal and external tickets and increase your customer satisfaction.

To run a successful business, KYI (Knowing Your IT) is as important as KYC (Knowing Your Customer) you must have total control over your tickets, just as you must keep your staff in check.!