Real-time monitoring of optical performance has been shown to enable hardware savings by operating the transport network closer to the performance limits. Despite this, most studies forgo operational considerations, such as the procedures to be enforced when an active media channel (MCh) is too close to the performance limit and it is no longer acceptable to use it in the present configuration. Importantly, the operational models that can be adopted to perform this task are dependent on factors such as the transport node architecture and the service level agreement (SLA). Hence, this work describes three main strategies to exploit reduced margin provisioning in a transport network, comparing their performance over reference networks in terms of key metrics such as the extent of hardware savings and the number of, potentially traffic affecting, re-routing events.