Both Sides of the Bill: A National Distributor Gets Fixed and Wireless Spend Under Control

$1.1M in combined annual savings. One program. Zero internal headcount added.

A Problem That Grew Quietly

Growth covers a lot of sins. For a national food and beverage distributor operating 80 distribution centers and regional offices across 25 states, the telecom situation had been quietly deteriorating for years while the company’s attention was elsewhere, on expanding routes, acquiring regional competitors, and scaling warehouse operations.

Wireless service for roughly 2,200 drivers and field staff had been managed at the regional level for so long that nobody at the corporate level had a clear picture of what plans were in place, which carriers were under contract, or how much any of it cost by region. Fixed-line services at the facilities, dedicated circuits, broadband, and legacy voice lines, were being invoiced monthly by a rotating cast of carriers, paid by accounts payable, and otherwise left alone.

Finance could tell you the total telecom spend. What they couldn’t tell you was whether it was reasonable.

When the company finally commissioned a full review, the answer came back the same way it does for most organizations that have never done one: the number was higher than it should have been, and the reasons why were scattered across two entirely separate cost categories that had never been looked at together.

What “Unmanaged” Actually Looks Like

Before the engagement started, Mindglobal’s team spent several weeks simply establishing what existed. This is not a dramatic phase of a TEM program, but it is usually the most revealing one.

On the wireless side: four carrier relationships across regional footprints, with plan structures that hadn’t been revisited since before unlimited data became standard. A significant percentage of devices, particularly those assigned to drivers with routes that hadn’t changed in years, were on plans that bore no relationship to actual usage patterns. Some lines weren’t assigned to active employees at all.

On the fixed side: the picture was more fragmented. Facilities acquired through regional acquisitions had brought their own carrier relationships with them. Several locations were paying for circuit capacity that made sense when the facility was a hub; by the time of the engagement, those locations had been downgraded to spoke operations. The circuits stayed. The invoices kept arriving. Nobody had ordered the disconnects.

There were also billing discrepancies, not dramatic ones, but consistent: small rate variances that didn’t match contract terms, taxes applied incorrectly across state lines, charges persisting after service modifications were requested but never confirmed as completed. Individually, these were noise. Aggregated across 80 locations over three years, they added up.

One Program, Both Categories

The decision to engage Mindglobal across fixed and wireless simultaneously wasn’t obvious at first. The company’s initial instinct was to prioritize wireless, since that’s where most organizations start, and address fixed later. Mindglobal made the case for doing both at once, not because it was twice the work, but because the reporting and governance infrastructure needed to be built one time, not twice.

That argument proved correct. A unified cost center allocation model was built covering all 80 facilities and mapped to the company’s existing GL structure. For the first time, regional operations managers could see what telecom actually cost to run their facilities, broken out between mobile workforce connectivity and fixed infrastructure.

On the wireless side, Mindglobal conducted a full rate plan optimization across all 2,200 devices, consolidating carrier relationships where it made economic sense and restructuring plan assignments based on actual usage data. Idle lines were identified, verified, and removed. Device procurement and onboarding were brought under a managed workflow to prevent the same inventory drift from happening again.

Fixed-line management followed a similar progression: a circuit inventory was built from scratch, billing disputes were filed and pursued, contracts on month-to-month terms were renegotiated, and MACD coordination was centralized so that facility changes moved through a single process instead of getting lost between real estate and telecom.

The Numbers

Twelve months in, the results across both programs were clear.

Wireless spend dropped by 19 percent, delivering $680,000 in annual savings. Fixed telecom came down by 21 percent, adding another $420,000. Combined, the program generated more than $1.1 million in recurring annual savings against a management fee that the company recovered in under four months.

The reporting, arguably, delivered as much value as the savings. Regional directors who had never had visibility into telecom costs by location now had monthly dashboards that broke down spend against headcount, device count, and route activity. That kind of operational transparency doesn’t show up in a savings calculation, but it changes how decisions get made.

The Broader Point

Companies in distribution, logistics, and field-service industries face a particular challenge with telecom because the cost is genuinely split: there’s a mobile workforce that needs connectivity on the road, and a fixed infrastructure that keeps facilities running. Most TEM programs are designed around one or the other.

Managing them separately creates its own inefficiencies. Governance frameworks get built twice. Reporting doesn’t reconcile. The same carrier relationships get negotiated by different teams with different leverage. And the view from finance is never quite complete.

The cleaner approach, and the one that consistently produces better outcomes, is to treat fixed and wireless as two components of a single telecom program and manage them that way from the start.

For organizations managing only fixed infrastructure, see how Mindglobal delivered $1.8M in savings with a fixed-only program: National Professional Services Firm Reclaims $1.8M in Annual Fixed Telecom Spend.

Results are from a single client engagement. Individual outcomes vary based on organization size, carrier portfolio, and baseline management practices. Contact Mindglobal to discuss what a unified telecom management program could look like for your organization.