Cambridge MC boosts comms procurement with Carrier Club acquisition

As companies and public sector organisations seek to reduce operational costs amid rising economic and geopolitical pressures that continue to weigh heavily on budgets, international consulting firm Cambridge Management Consulting has acquired telecommunications cost reduction specialist The Carrier Club.

Founded in 2016 to tap into the opportunity for a “unique” procurement-as-a-service organisation based on its knowledge and reputation, The Carrier Club has operated on the principle that “in business, as in life, you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate”.

Recognising that delivering on organisational cost can be extremely challenging, the company said it foresaw the advantage of a buying club that can facilitate “market rates” for members.

To date, The Carrier Club has mainly provided procurement-as-a-service for telecommunications companies and enterprises that either lacked the scale for an in-house telecommunications procurement function or needed additional, complementary resources for specific procurement or cost-saving initiatives.

It has worked with telecommunications operators and enterprises of all sizes, claiming that its work has made it possible to reduce the cost of customers’ access and core network infrastructure by up to 30% of their cost base, saving clients millions of pounds on their telecommunications spend.

Cambridge Management Consulting (Cambridge MC) is an international consulting firm that aims to help companies have a better impact on the world. Founded in Cambridge, UK, initially to help the startup community, Cambridge MC has grown to over 200 consultants working on projects in 25 countries, with offices or legal entities in Cambridge, London, New York, Paris, Dubai, Singapore and Helsinki. Further expansion is planned in future.

The company’s capabilities focus on supporting the private and public sectors with their people, process and digital technology challenges, and it aims to realise increased growth and cost savings through digital transformation while creating a greater impact on every individual connected to a business.

Commenting on the acquisition, Nigel Meacham, co-founder of The Carrier Club, said: “We have been working with the Cambridge Management Consulting team on many projects for some time. The time is now right to fully integrate the two businesses, which will expand Cambridge Management Consulting’s cost transformation offering for its clients.”

Combining our expertise more closely with the wider Cambridge Management Consulting team makes perfect sense at a time when companies and government departments need to work harder than ever to control costs

Eric Green, fellow co-founder of The Carrier Club, added: “When engaged by clients, we have consistently helped them to reduce a significant proportion of their telecommunications cost base. Combining our expertise more closely with the wider Cambridge Management Consulting team makes perfect sense at a time when companies and government departments need to work harder than ever to control costs.”

For its part, the Cambridge-headquartered consulting firm is confident that the acquisition will strengthen its procurement and commercial offering as it continues to add artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools to its cost reduction toolkit. The firm recently expanded its AI capabilities to extract cost data from clients’ financial systems and benchmark it, using the latest AI technology, against best-in-market pricing to identify further savings for clients.

“In these times of enormous geopolitical risk and uncertainty, organisations are under growing pressure to remove unnecessary costs from their operations, and we are seeing more clients coming to us for support with this,” remarked Tim Passingham, founder and executive chairman of Cambridge Management Consulting. “Acquiring The Carrier Club – one of a number of acquisitions we are planning – will enable us to add even greater value to our clients in these challenging times.”