When to nudge a delinquent customer for a payment — that is the question. Or rather, that is one of many — many — questions that Signals are helping telecom companies (telcos) answer. Because when to call and ask for payment can actually help determine whether to call at all, and eliminating calls can lead to significant savings. So how do Signals do this? And more important, how can telcos, specifically, take advantage of these Signals to improve customer experience and maximize bottom-line impact?

It’s no longer enough to simply manage suppliers. Without a strong handle on everything that’s happening in your company’s supply chain, you will miss big savings opportunities.

In a recovering economy, procurement managers need to know more about how their organization's total supply chain works than ever before. As business starts to fire on all cylinders again, it’s clear things have changed. Not only are we experiencing the truly global, challengingly mercurial commercial landscape everyone talked about before the bust, but the need to keep a close eye on exactly what’s going on day to day has shattered old supply chain and procurement best practices — even from just a few years ago. But now, new spend analytics solutions offer impressive capabilities that allow supply chain managers both deep and wide views of their spend. With these tools, it’s possible to shine a spotlight on problem areas that were previously hidden in siloed expense reports, forgotten contracts, and operations with little or no oversight.

It’s easy for money to slip through your fingers on business trips. Here are six ways to get it back. 

Anyone who’s ever entertained a client or taken a business trip knows how fast that expense report can add up. But administrators and category spend managers are left wondering, where did that money go exactly? And how do we go about cutting back? The answer, of course, is in the data. And (of course), it’s complicated. But complicated is what Big Data solutions do best.

Shipping costs can easily get away from managers, but help is on the way.

Have you ever shipped a package across town and accidentally paid for overnight air to get it there? Or negotiated a contract with a shipping company only to have the contract ignored or forgotten about a week later? Or paid to have something arrive by 10:00am only to find out that it didn’t arrive until 3:00pm?  

After spending several painful months negotiating contracts with your vendor partners and haggling over every cent for IT resource rates, you finally managed to get the best rate card across multiple roles and geographies. So with a little help from some run-of-the-mill, rate-compliance monitoring system, the hundreds or thousands of projects with these contracted vendors will run on cruise control, right? Wrong. A few months down the line, you’ll notice you are paying more for every hour of work than you were prior to the rate negotiations, even though the rates were negotiated down by 5–10% across the board.

JERSEY CITY, N.J., Apr. 19, 2012 — Opera Solutions, LLC (www.operasolutions.com), a global leader in machine-learning science and advanced Big Data analytics, today disclosed the joint acquisition of BIQ, a specialist in OLAP analysis software and spend analysis, and Lexington Analytics, a leading distributor of BIQ and provider of analytic services to procurement professionals.