A rarely-used twist on cost-out OSS business cases

How many OSS business cases have you seen that are built around cost reduction? Most of them??

Now let me ask the same question, but with one extra word included and see whether it completely inverts your answer. How many OSS business cases have you seen that are built on capital cost reduction? None of them?? Almost every “cost-out” business case is built on operational cost reduction (eg head-count reduction) – OPEX, not CAPEX – right?

So, you may ask, what does a CAPEX-reduction business case get built around? The benefits tend to be a little more obscure, but let’s see if they might work for you.

  1. The first is probably also the most obvious – speed and cost of deployment. Not of the OSS itself, but all of the projects and micro-projects that the OSS helps to manage. If your OSS can systematically reduce deployment time and/or cost, then you get significant cost out
  2. Asset utilisation – if you can find better ways to spread the load across your assets, then there’s less to spend on asset augmentation
  3. Asset identification – you might be surprised at how many assets go missing and not necessarily through pilfering. I advised on a project where the payback period on a complete OSS was only a couple of months because the customer found a few very expensive pieces of equipment that were purchased, tested, physically connected (and having maintenance paid on) but never had services activated through them. The customer was just about to order a few more of the same devices to augment the network, but didn’t need to (a slightly different example of #2 above)
  4. Cost justification of assets – to use historical and projected information to optimise new build (ie equipment purchase, deployment time, etc)
  5. Life-cycle optimisation – better management of spares and equipment / network lifespans
  6. Leakage identification – another slightly different twist on #2, whereby leakage reduction allows delays in CAPEX allocation

Now, in the unlikely event that this has opened up a new line of thinking for you, what other examples of CAPEX-out measures can you think of in your OSS / network?

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