In Summary:

• Cobb County, Georgia public safety officials wanted to assure they were paying a fair price for support of their land mobile radio (LMR) system.

• Working alongside MCP, they completed a fair market pricing assessment and data-driven analysis for the LMR system maintenance costs.

• Armed with this information, the partnership was able to negotiate more favorable cost targets, enhanced system performance reports and significant savings on costs.

Overview and Agency Challenge

Looking to lower expenses without sacrificing support, Cobb County, Georgia, began exploring the possibilities of renegotiating their Project 25 (P25) land mobile radio system maintenance agreement with the vendor. They wanted to better understand the services, terms and conditions, and the associated costs included with the maintenance contract. With limited knowledge of how their fees compared to similar-sized systems in the public safety sector, they sought assurance they were paying a fair price for the support provided.

Solution

The County looked to Mission Critical Partners to provide vendor management and support services, and, together, the two organizations created a mutually-acceptable process for communication. Committed to finding cost-saving opportunities, the Cobb County–MCP team sought clarification from the P25 radio vendor on the proposal and its components. After conducting a fair market pricing assessment and completing a data-driven analysis, they outlined a negotiation plan that included more favorable cost targets, enhanced required system performance reports and improved activity tracking.

Results

Working together, the MCP and Cobb County team were able to make significant progress towards driving service excellent from Cobb’s radio maintenance vendor.

• The vendor revised their contract to include terms that would help the County achieve more in terms of support for significantly less money.
• Unnecessary expenses were eliminated.
• The overall lifecycle costs associated with their P25 radio system and network were reduced.

With their newly-negotiated savings, the County covered their MCP fee and had additional dollars they could allocate towards other improvements. They plan to continue their work with MCP building a strategic technology roadmap that will help them better plan for future system upgrade investments.

“MCP helped us negotiate a very large vendor support agreement. They were thorough, professional and excellent to work with. Through their efforts, we experienced significant savings on our support, operational improvements and a stronger agreement than we started with.”
~Tracy Roberts, Radio System Manager, Cobb County, Georgia