Solutions & Savings

Finding Solutions

Business analytics made simple.  Cost-savings made possible.

If you have ever wondered if you are paying too much for essential goods or services, you are not alone. All too often, operating costs are unknowingly overpaid, which drains sorely needed resources. Our various processes will reveal ways to immediately reduce expenses without cutting mission critical services. We find savings 98 percent of the time. Frequently, we even improve your level of services while cutting your expenses.

Service agreements are complex contracts that are typically written by the provider.  RAS’ industry specific experts cut through the complexities in contracts, which can result in overpayments year after year. We benchmark your costs against similar sized organizations, and work to negotiate a better price for the goods or services…often from the same vendors you are already using.

Once you authorize your vendors to work with us, we conduct our work remotely through electronic means, safely out of your staff’s way. RAS’ is not affiliated with any vendors, so you are assured of an independent, unbiased review.

Our Solutions and Savings processes require minimal client involvement, so your staff is not diverted from their regular duties. We do the work, and you reap the benefits!

Telecommunications & IT

Telecom & Data

To get the best deal on telecom/data services you need to understand 300+ complex pricing variables in telecommunications billing practice.  And, to maximize negotiating power, you need to know what other organizations of comparable size are being charged for their services.  Our national proprietary database allows us to compare your current vendor pricing and terms to rates similar-sized organizations are paying. We can negotiate and implement those best-in-class prices for you—typically with your existing vendor.

Are you certain you have the best available contract for your services? 

Are you sure all billed charges paid over the years were accurate? 

 Are you sure you are not due any refunds?  

Many RAS clients have answered “yes” to all three questions, only to learn differently after RAS reviewed their contracts, data plans and services and documented how much RAS could save them.

A factor that distinguishes us from the competition is our ability to conduct a physical on-site telecom line audit by Certified Telecom Switch Operators, which is a highly skilled and labor-intensive service. Most organizations do not have internal telecom staff with the specific training and credentials necessary to conduct an on-site line audit.

We adhere to all Covid-19 precautions and will only need a staff person to unlock the telephone room/closet for our certified auditor to conduct the work.

RAS auditors match each line and circuit for each carrier invoice to the physical line or circuit in each of a client’s buildings. We physically trace each line and circuit to make certain they are connected, working, and necessary to meet the client’s needs. 

In addition, we conduct a traffic study on all circuits that documents actual usage over time, thereby enabling you to right-size your services. For example, you might be paying for a 100 mg. circuit yet only using 6 mg. of that capacity. Knowing you can reduce that circuit to 10 mg. and still have excess capacity to meet your needs saves you money.

Results:  RAS saves clients an annual average of 24% on telecom and data services and has achieved up to 60% annual savings for some clients.

Cell Phones

In only 2 – 4 weeks RAS can conduct a full review of all wireless devices and requirements for your organization. The entire analysis is performed remotely from our office. We need minimal time from your staff to support this initiative.  With your authorization to access your cell phone vendor’s online portal, we can conduct a complete review of all contracts and billing to ensure that your invoices reflect the appropriate discounts and correct taxes.

Our review documents all current usage, including data, text, pictures, and voice (national and international), and maps all current contracts, plans, discounts, and taxes. We use our proprietary national database to ensure you are getting best-in-class pricing from your vendors. Since vendor plans change often, we will recommend the plan that best matches your current overall usage.

In addition to reviewing all usage from the last three consecutive billing cycles, RAS documents all devices not used during the review period, thereby providing a list of possible disconnects for your consideration. We review this list with you to ensure that no emergency or disaster recovery phones will be impacted.

Results:  RAS saves clients an annual average of 35% on cell phone services.

Information Technology

With a single, comprehensive IT management program in place, an organization’s efficiency and productivity go up and administrative costs go down.  RAS helps clients achieve this by inventorying and consolidating their existing IT hardware, software, and service agreements. Duplicative effort is eliminated, fixed annual maintenance costs are established, and a life cycle management plan is created to extend the useful life expectancy of equipment.

Results:  RAS saves clients an annual average of 18% on information technology services.

Waste Management & Medical Bio-Hazard Waste

No organization wants to throw money away, but RAS has found that, in four out of five cases, that is exactly what clients have been doing.  They unknowingly have been paying waste vendor overcharges, for which RAS can obtain refunds for up to five years of prior billings. 

We achieve cost savings based on our extensive contract and invoice analysis of waste management services for all categories of waste, including solid, medical and pharmacy, bio-hazardous, recycling, hauling, shredding, janitorial, laundry and grease.  RAS compares each vendor’s pricing to our proprietary national database of best-in-class rates and negotiates those best rates for our client.

RAS analyzes multiple invoiced costs that are never specifically covered in the contracts and compares fee differentials for different geographic regions to negotiate price adjustments with your current vendor.

In addition to continuous project reporting, we provide a comprehensive, detailed audit report listing each billing error and overcharge, and include specific recommendations for ongoing cost savings.  Then we implement all client-approved recommendations. To ensure you receive accurate billing going forward, RAS verifies your billing and cost-savings for the duration of our engagement.

Results: RAS saves clients an annual average of almost 40% in medical waste disposal; and an annual average of 34% in combined medical and solid waste disposal.

Pharmacy Benefits

Self-insured employee benefits programs typically pay for millions of prescriptions annually for their staff, dependents and retirees, which are processed by its Pharmacy Benefit Manager (PBM). With millions of prescriptions filled annually, even small financial errors on a number of prescriptions filled can add up to significant dollars. 

RAS’ unique evaluation models include consultation, pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) selection, contract negotiation, and claim-by-claim Employer Plan and Medicare Part D auditing. RAS identifies problem areas and delivers an action plan that ensures you have the most cost-effective program.   Your employees get the coverage they expect, and you gain control over pharmacy costs. Plus, we perform our work remotely through electronic means, safely out of your staff’s way.

Our audit process codes all your contract requirements and exclusions into our robust technology solution to mirror the exact parameters used by your PBM to determine payments on your behalf. RAS then loads PBM paid claims for three prior years, or more, and prices each prescription based on its price the date it was originally filled, factoring in program requirements and exclusions to determine any discrepancies. We provide a line-by-line detailed report on each inconsistency, the reason for each error, and the total dollar amount of overcharges. Upon your approval, RAS then recovers the prior overcharges for you.

Further, we can monitor PBM charges going forward to ensure you are paying the accurate amount for your employees’ pharmacy benefits.

Medicare Part D Prescription Program Requirements

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) require that health plans comply with regulations related to Part D coverage for your retirees.  CMS places compliance with its regulations on the employer, which faces penalties for non-compliance. RAS provides the strong data driven monitoring tools to accomplish the required level of oversight.

In addition to the prescription claim audit, CMS requires extensive reporting requirements on the Medicare Part D programs, which RAS’ process will automatically provide.

Results:  RAS saves clients an annual average of 10% on pharmacy benefits costs.

Risk Management & Insurance

Everything is possible when you can manage or take away the risk. As such, when it comes to expanding and protecting your organization, we invite you to learn how we can help you meet and exceed your goals!

RAS puts its experts with unique skill sets in risk management and insurance to work on mitigating challenges we recognize clients face in those areas.  Our integrated service delivery team can examine the various components of your risk management and insurance program and help you identify issues that are increasing your total cost of risk. The causes may be diverse and are often hidden.

We assess risk across a wide range of areas including group liability, property and casualty, facility, vehicle, and marine.  Then our team designs plans tailored to meet your needs and mitigate risk, while optimizing insurance coverage and minimizing spend.

 If your insurance program includes pharmacy benefits for employees, RAS has you covered there, too.  To help lower pharmacy expenses, we offer a range of consulting, auditing, and modeling tools to identify problem areas.  Then we design a cost-effective program tailored to your organization.   

Results: RAS saves clients an annual average of 5% – 30% on insurance benefits.

Office Supplies, Furniture & Equipment

If you know “best-in-class pricing” you can tell if you are, or aren’t, getting the best deal.  When it comes to office expenses, there is no “if” about it.  RAS knows. RAS identifies opportunities for potential savings in such areas as equipment, furniture, printing services and record management, and can negotiate the best pricing for future contracts.

Our goal is to Implement approved, targeted areas for cost reduction without negatively impacting operations. We customize recommendations to meet your needs and only implement improvements upon your approval. Finally, we deliver a detailed Findings and Recommendations report on the initiative.

Results:  RAS saves clients an annual average of 35% on office supplies, furniture and equipment.

Copiers/Managed Print

While copiers can’t print real money, they can cost you real dollars if your vendor’s rates aren’t competitive.  To determine if better rates are available, from the current or a different vendor, RAS performs a comprehensive contract compliance audit of a client’s copier agreements.  The audit inventories all your equipment to establish your baseline, benchmarks your current costs, and evaluates existing purchase and/or lease terms, conditions, and services.  With approval, RAS then renegotiates existing agreements using our national proprietary database of best-in-class prices to achieve the greatest value for your organization.

RAS can also develop a strategic Request for Proposal (RFP) to achieve improved copier/print services at lower cost.

Results:  RAS saves clients an annual average of 29% on copier and managed print services.

Real Estate & Facilities Management

Safe and efficient workplaces, whether traditional or hybrid, are critical to good employee performance. A positive workplace experience created through comprehensive facilities management can increase productivity, reduce turnover, and contribute to your organization’s bottom line. RAS has the tools, technologies, and services to help ensure the short- and long-term value of your property, buildings, and equipment.

 Real estate is the second-highest cost for an organization, but effective space management can reduce that cost by up to 25%.  For example, we can optimize your leases: move from owned to leased and from lease to lease on demand, implement a database to manage real estate costs and support footprint optimization, and optimize costs for utility, facility management and property tax.  And while land, real estate, or buildings are considered the least liquid assets an organization has, RAS can help identify appropriate unproductive assets on the books that may be converted into cash through creative real estate strategies, such as selling with a leaseback arrangement coupled with a buy-back option at a future date.  This can result in reduced expenses now, freeing up cash for other uses while providing flexibility to regain the asset should current circumstances later change. 

 Research shows that superior facilities management can lead to significant reduction in overall capital project costs, and that an organization can realize even more savings by introducing integrated smart systems into existing buildings.

 RAS helps you achieve these bottom-line savings through use of facilities management technology that can optimize your utilities spend, assess the investment required to upgrade properties, find alternative funding mechanisms, and negotiate utilities costs with your providers to create more productive, cost-efficient environments. 

Results: RAS saves clients 15% – 25% annually on real estate and facilities management.

Electrical Equipment Maintenance Solutions

RAS can reduce your operating costs while simplifying administration.

Need your electronic equipment serviced or repaired? Struggling to track the multitude of service contracts and who to call for what? RAS eliminates this hassle by establishing one organization-wide 800 phone number that solves your problem for all electronic equipment service needs. One call does it all— it sets up a service call with the vendor of your choice, whether for a hand-held device or highly sophisticated technical equipment.

Significant cost savings result from reducing time and effort in administering numerous service agreements and extended warranties from multiple equipment and service providers.  RAS consolidates those documents into a single less costly, more flexible agreement.  Coverage under the agreement even includes costs associated with parts, labor, travel, emergency repair, and preventative maintenance. 

Clients continue to select their service providers, while RAS provides a single point of contact and accountability for managing service events. Along with savings in dollars, time and effort comes a fixed annual cost for services, replacing variable and adjustable costs under other maintenance programs.  Knowing with certainty what your annual costs will be gives you better control over planning and execution of your maintenance budget.

We analyze your current equipment maintenance portfolio, maintenance agreements, historical maintenance expenditures, and operational practices to develop a customized program to meet your unique needs. The goal of each program is to deliver the specialized management tools, expertise, and support necessary for you to achieve enhanced equipment performance coupled with significant cost savings.

Results: RAS saves clients an annual average of 15% – 25% on equipment maintenance and repair costs.

Travel

Marketing

Every organization markets to its clients.  The goal of marketing is to get and keep them interested in your products and services.  Marketing in the digital world is rich with opportunities but also complicated by a myriad of challenges.

RAS makes this complex process easy for you, helping you build a strong marketing plan, assessing your current marketing strategy and advising you on how to best apply your operational and financial marketing resources.  We then can implement the plan, track progress against your objectives and, analyze and report on results in real time.

Marketing is the broad umbrella under which advertising and selling fall.  It is a multi-pronged discipline turning on such interdependent activities as researching market and consumer behaviors to identify wants and needs, establishing target markets, profiling competitors, and designing and creating materials and effective strategies for building awareness and instilling brand loyalty.  It includes determining which of the many available strategies are best able to help you achieve your objectives. Should you rely on email? On mobile marketing?  On inbound marketing?  On a combination of these techniques and tactics?  Or on something else?

Marketing is key to an organization’s success.  It is a powerful tool but one that consumes time, energy, and money whether or not it is done right.    RAS works to ensure your marketing planning…and plan…is continually optimized and that all those organizational resources are coordinated and applied to maximize your success.

RAS saves clients 8% – 12% annually on marketing costs.

Temporary Staffing & Professional Services

Organizations encounter times when workload, no matter how carefully projected, gets out of control.  Emergencies, new business opportunities or unexpected personnel losses in a range of positions, including executive, operational, technology and office management, all impact staffing needs.  But the work must go on without interruption. If being flexible requires you to rely on temporary labor and professional services contracts during these times, RAS will analyze those contracts, actual staffing requirements, and costs to show you ways to maximize the value of your contracts while reducing expenses.  We will look at how you may best achieve an effective balance between permanent and temporary personnel, not just in terms of expenses but in terms of productivity. 

 Deciding whether you need to hire anyone to get the job done is the first step.  Sometimes by reassigning work or even curtailing some tasks you can free up resources to tackle a new project.  If that is not possible, if an analysis proves you need one or more persons on a temporary basis, then temporary staff may be the best cost-effective option.  But a temporary contract employee who essentially becomes a permanent staff member, for example through an ongoing contract for a project with no terminal endpoint or with ever-changing assignments, may be costing you more money than it would to hire a full- or part-time employee, assuming no bar to doing so (e.g., budget constraints or a hiring freeze).

 Once RAS understands your operational requirements and financial resources, we can help you select the optimal employment strategy.  This includes deciding whether you need the person to be on-site or whether they can work remotely, whether the person must be a US citizen (which for some government work is required by law) and, assuming this is not otherwise prohibited or undesirable, whether services can be provided by sources located outside the US (referred to as “offshore”, e.g., computer programmers located in a foreign country) as opposed to sources within the US (referred to as “onshore”) and the relative comparative costs.

After the general hiring strategy is defined, RAS will review the employment contract and recommend any modifications required to ensure you are able to select or reject people referred to you based on their qualifications and experience and that, once in place, the contract is well managed.   RAS will audit charges to confirm you are being appropriately and fairly charged for the services for which you are paying.

RAS saves clients 8% – 15% annually on temporary staffing and professional services.

Energy Cost Reduction & Management Services

Utilities might account for more than 15% of your budget. Subtle rate changes, which often go unnoticed, can have substantial financial impact on the bottom line when multiplied over time and numerous locations.

RAS’ strategies can reduce energy rates and consumption while creating new revenue streams. Our energy management team has over 50 years combined experience in the energy industry, with a 95% success rate of achieving savings.

The energy procurement process is complex. But RAS’ experienced utility team knows where and how to identify opportunities for savings, whether by taking advantage of purchasing power on off-peak rates or changing to a lower tariff rate for meters.

We develop a strategic energy plan for you to help lower costs for utility services, including electricity, natural gas, water, sewer, gas and fuel oil.  Additionally, we review the past three years of invoices looking for errors for which a refund is due.

RAS provides a complete and customizable picture of the market, your usage and spend, making it simple to identify cost savings and energy generating opportunities:

• Track of all your energy contracts, usage, bills, and compare current vs. historical
• Identify anomalies and recover prior overpayments
• Manage energy efficiently in real time
• Set price triggers and market alerts
• Track market data energy demand

Results:  RAS saves clients an annual average of 10% on utility services.

Logistics & Freight

Get a handle on your logistics costs.

Shipping, freight, warehousing logistics, and inventory management inherently have several moving parts. As a result, it is challenging to determine whether you are getting the most cost-effective return on your dollars for these services. RAS’ industry experts solve that problem for you by comparing best-in-class services to our proprietary database of pricing for similar-sized organizations. Then they use this knowledge to improve your contracts and lock-in future cost-savings for your organization.

RAS employs advanced data analytics to optimize your logistics and freight operations. Some additional solutions RAS can provide are a freight audit and payment system, transportation sourcing, spend management, and parcel and express management. Our technology solutions include carrier rating and routing, web enabled Bill of Lading, supply chain visibility, and management reporting.

Results:  RAS saves clients an annual average of 8% – 12% on logistics costs.

Fleet & Fleet Maintenance

Needed equipment and vehicles often represent substantial outlays for RAS’ clients.  Buy them?  Lease them?  Do some combination of both?  There are a number of factors to consider in reaching a cost-effective decision.  Like initial outlays, tax benefits, asset life expectancy, ongoing expenses such as maintenance and repairs, importance of asset ownership, rental/lease terms and conditions, obsolescence, disposal and more.  It can be confusing, and the wrong decision can prove expensive. 

RAS simplifies this process by analyzing a client’s requirements and available resources, including availability of in-house technicians, and by calculating equipment and vehicle use and associated expenses.  As unauthorized use of vehicles drives up costs, we look to see if the client has a GPS-powered remote monitoring system in place to help prevent this from occurring. RAS then determines the optimal strategy given the client’s short- and long-term goals (e.g., conserve working capital, access the latest equipment, eliminate need for collateral).  Finally, with the client’s approval, RAS negotiates equipment and vehicle acquisition and other ancillary costs such as fuel.

“Buy or lease?” is a tricky question.  But not for RAS.  Our industry expertise coupled with our proprietary database of best-in-class pricing can deliver positive results for your organization.

Results: RAS saves clients an annual average of 9% – 17% on equipment and vehicle rental.

Lease Management & Accounting

New government requirements have you tied in knots?

How do you keep track of all your organization’s accounting and reporting information for your leased equipment? We can make it easy to comply with new GASB-87 rules for public sector entities and ASC 842 requirements for private companies. Our automated system manages critical dates, monitors obligations, and tracks data organization-wide for all your leases.

Our solution integrates with all major financial systems. It provides all necessary data to automatically perform lease calculations, based on your unique processes and reporting requirements. It can easily generate all necessary reports.

We provide unlimited user-defined fields, customizable reporting, and personalized dashboard views. Our highly intuitive platform is easy to use, enabling you to efficiently find the information you need. The audit trail function shows all changes, so you know what was changed, and when.

Cost for the comprehensive lease management and accounting solution is based on the number of licenses, with no limit on the number of users per license.

Document Storage

Beverage Contracts