€4M in telecom, one Vodafone MSA, 30% savings.

The Challenge

Amazon EMEA was running on 16 local carrier contracts. Identical service, wildly different pricing, often outdated. An engineer in Dublin was paying 3x more than an engineer in Madrid for the same plan, with nobody able to explain why, because nobody was looking at the 16 contracts side by side. We were paying for employees who had left, with no idea where their phones were. Multi-thousand-euro overage bills on a single line dropped occasionally.

And IoT was exploding. Delivery teams were all kitted out with connected devices, each with its own SIM, data, cost. IoT volumes were growing 3x faster than contracts could absorb them. Overages and bad volume forecasting could mean hundreds of thousands of euros in overage costs every month. Security and data-residency requirements stacked up across 16 jurisdictions with no shared framework.

What I Found

Real IoT volumes were 3x what the procurement team believed. Local contracts contained roaming lock-in clauses costing €2M+/year in opaque pass-throughs. GDPR plus national data-residency compliance was handled case by case, with no master annex. Every new deployment re-negotiated the same clauses.

Hidden cost was operational: 16 carriers meant 16 order processes, 16 invoice streams to reconcile, 16 tier-2 support paths. The cost of fragmentation outweighed the cost of pricing itself.

The Approach

Full renegotiation by setting up a single partnership with Vodafone. EU-wide MSA covering both corporate mobility (25,000+ lines) and IoT (100,000+ SIMs), Initial Country Contracts (ICC) signed in parallel, country-by-country cost renegotiation.

Corporate mobility (25,000+ lines):

• Overage penalty reduction: lower rates and fewer triggers thanks to volume pooled across lines.
• Contractual improvements allowing line add/remove without amendment.
• Embedded hardware budgets (phones, indoor coverage).

IoT (100,000+ SIMs):

• Country-by-country cost renegotiation.
• Dedicated governance to sharpen the management: better SIM tracking, immediate deactivation on abuse, sharper volume forecasting.

Fleet management:

• Single MDM deployed to steer security and compliance from one place.
• BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) model rolled out with support, plus negotiation of preferred carrier deals for Amazon's logistics partners.

Data residency annex. Aligned to GDPR and the national rules of 14 active jurisdictions, with on-demand proof of hosting. One annex, validated once, reusable on every new deployment.

Contract governance. A single EMEA-wide contract manager, monthly consumption steering, drift alerts on the silent overruns that erode every telecom contract. Quarterly strategic QBRs to make sure value is delivered beyond price.

Transition. Gradual 9-month switch, with a 30-day overlap per country to secure service continuity on critical lines (fulfilment sites under SLA).