Since it’s impossible to get away from cost reduction, inspired by a recent SIG article on “Strategic Cost Management: The Survivor’s Playbook to Savings”, which listed the following high-impact projects for same year savings:

• Software Maintenance-Rate Reduction
  Identify all of the maintenance contracts, annual spend, and maintenance percentages. Develop a standard maintenance agreement and standard percentage for annual maintenance, require an exception appoval process with senior management involvement for any alterations, and focus (re)negotiations on highest savings opportunities. Savings of 5%+ is not uncommon.
• Software Maintenance-Elimination
  Eliminate maintenance on all non-critical systems or all systems where annual maintenance cost is low. (In the latter case, even if the system is critical, it will cost less to re-instate the maintenance on a system at a later time if it is required than to pay maintenance on all such systems.)
• Legal Services-Hourly Rate Reduction
  Most legal firms raise costs annually regardless of competitive market conditions. (Threaten to) conduct a sourcing exercise and watch rates drop quickly.
• Legal Services-Bundles and AFAs (Alternate Fee Arrangements)
  For general legal services that are project or task oriented, and not litigation oriented, bundles or AFAs can save the company a significant amount of money.
• Desktop Printers-Elimination
  Shared multi-function devices, with password printing, are much cheaper to operate than individual desktop printers.

here are a few more quick-hit cost savings projects that will generate cost savings if the organization has not run them (recently):

• Marketing-Print
  Unbundle print from creative services and then run a quick sourcing project. Significant cost reductions in the 10% to 20% range (or more) will quickly materialize when printers are being faced off against each other.
• Office Supplies-Live SKU Guarantees & Price Checks
  Everyone knows that a quick auction will drop prices across the board, but most category experts also know that the vendors make this back by raising prices a few months down the road when they think no one is looking and by bidding expiring SKUs, which will be substituted with higher price items down the road. Insisting on a clause that states that all SKUs must not be schduled to reach end of life within the contract term, and that any SKU that is retired must be replaced with a SKU of equivalent, or greater, functionality at current, or reduced, cost will prevent those overpayments and insure that significantly greater savings materialize.
• Computers-Overpayment Recovery
  Most vendors don’t honor the “best price” clause and generally charge the same rate for the life of the contract, even though most computers and components decrease 2% to 3% a month. A careful spend audit will typically reveal 10% or more in overpayments that can be targetted quickly.