Proactive Cost Control

Managing service costs requires the ability to establish sound service budgets and streamline the control of actual service costs throughout your daily operations. With the complexity of managing many customers and service offerings, it is important to be able to establish proactive alerts that can highlight potential cost problems before they occur. ServiceFlow delivers intuitive, multi-dimensional reporting capabilities, enabling budget owners to focus only on the business unit and the geographical region of their responsibility as well as the services that they actually receive. ServiceFlow also provides a range of proactive techniques, including a set of pre-defined reports based on best practices and proactive cost alerts, that enable organizations to reduce risk of service budget overruns and optimize overall service spending. Following are several examples of how ServiceFlow can help spot service cost variances before they are issues and perform root-cause analysis to put corrective plans in place:

Actual versus Budget. Updated as often as you’d like, these ServiceFlow reports allow managers to keep track of their service spending and quickly take corrective actions in case of a sharp rise in service usage.

Top Spenders. The top spenders list is a key report helping to quickly identify those business units, regions, and individual employees that spend much more on services than their peers on average. While the higher spend may be required, this exception report provides a quick way to focus on the high spenders and restrict business costs when service use is not justified by business needs.

Usage Analysis. Decision makers use ServiceFlow to apply their own judgment and expertise to service billing and chargeback by leveraging its capabilities to help them analyze usage patterns and trends. Users are able to segment and analyze the service universe by organizational structure, geography, service line, time, and more to identify past usage patterns and current trends.

Cost Thresholds and Alerts. With ServiceFlow, thresholds are configurable for a range of conditions, such as a narrowing a variance gap between the actual spending and the allocated budget, that, when met, can trigger alerts to appropriate executives. Thresholds are also available for standard measures and configurable for specific cost metrics introduced by a user.