Investing in a Telecom Expense Management (TEM) system can provides significant long term benefits for those who choose adopt it. The ROI of TEM extends far beyond identifying billing errors while pursuing audits. The benefits from supporting these systems can be segmented into 2 main categories:

• Cost Transparency
• Process Efficiency

Cost Transparency

Seeing what you spend:

This is a huge benefit that helps companies understand their telecom environment. Carriers just aren’t doing enough to service businesses in this department.

ROI: Priceless

Contractual rates VS. Billing Rates:

With employees bringing their own devices to work more-and-more, it is becoming difficult for HR and IT to understand the complex relationships between devices, services, providers, and their users; It's often confusing as to where to cross the line between personal and corporate usage.

In addition, more serious concerns are being raised that could potentially threaten the overall health of an organization, such as:

• Security
• Control over company data
• Visibility
• Costs

Luckily there are a few steps HR and IT management can take that move towards gaining control over the BYOD environment..

When you think amount of data generated in your company’s telecom environment alone, it can seem overwhelming. Factors that contribute to exponential growth of telecom information include:

How to know you need one..

• You do not maintain an inventory of telecom services
• You feel like you are reading Greek when perusing a carrier invoice
• You blindly approve invoices because they are within 10% of the previous month’s charges
• The stack of paper invoices on your desk has exceeded 20 cm
• You rely on your telecom provider to tell you what you have, or diagnose the source of a network outage
• Your company has acquired a number of companies over the past few years and the temporary integration tactics are now permanent or long forgotten
• Your budget process relies solely on last year’s spend to determine the next fiscal operational budget
• You do not recognize even 1/10^th  of the assignments on your wireless invoice
• You cannot fend off your senior management’s request for information any longer…

Why you really should..

Conducting an audit will help bring clarity to your telecom environment and allow you take back control of these costs. By organizing all your cost data in a way that you (and even the senior managers breathing down your back) can understand, you can begin to start managing these costs effectively.

How Telecom Expense Management (TEM) is Being Leveraged to Include More than Just Telecom.

Being in the telecom industry for over seventeen years, I have seen a lot of trends come and go. Something that is trending now, and that I don’t see stopping anytime soon, is the adoption of telecom expense management tactics by organizations of all size levels.

A Complex Telecom Environment

What used to be the focus of large enterprise-size clients is now becoming a priority in the medium-market and even at the SMB client level. There is a big growth in mid-market sized firms seeking solutions, and this is being especially driven by wireless technology, complexity, and costs.

As technology in the work place continues to grow and evolve, telecom costs are now often in the top five expenses that an organization incurs. It is quite common for most organizations to not have any line of sight on who is using what in the company, how the services are being used, or if the charges are even valid.

The proliferation of novel devices and services, along with the BYOD phenomenon are causing companies to become increasingly concerned with these costs. As such, there is becoming an increasing need to provide an understanding and to have visibility at a granular level of these costs with clients often approaching us to help them figure it out.

1. Not knowing what devices you are paying for
• Do you actually know what devices your employees are using?
• Are they on Smartphones (or Superphones), Blackberrys, Iphones, Ipads, Air cards or cell phones?
• How many do you have of each in your fleet?
2. Not researching the most productive “work” devices
• What do your employees use their devices for?
• Are they doing conference calls? Texting? BBM-ing? Emails? Social Networking? Listening to music?
• Have you recently polled some employees as to what device would best work for their job?
• Have you looked at what`s new and exciting in the industry? A new device could boost work-productivity.

Expanding Beyond a Telecom Expense Management Solution

This case study will examine a unique system deployment for a Large Financial Institution. The bank was seeking a solution that needed to address:

• Telecom Expense Management
• IT Cost Transparency
• Employee Lifecycle Automation

Price ($) VS. Processing Speed (MHz)

Origins

The first commercialized mobile phone was introduced to the world 30 years ago in 1982. The Nokia Mobira Senator came in a suitcase, weighed a whopping 21 pounds, and had a hefty price tag, at nearly 6,000 bucks. 

Price Levels

It took approximately 17 years for the average mobile phone to reach a price level just under $1,000 (in 2009). Global adoption has been skyrocketing ever since with a world-wide adoption of more than 80% in 2012. Economies of scale, along with a highly competive market place helped fuel high levels of innovation in this industry.

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4 steps to help you take back control

For nearly 20 years I have found myself living and breathing the joys of the Telecom industry, specifically on the Wireless side.  Over these years, I have been very fortunate to experience this ever changing industry from many facets of the supply chain ranging from service provider, to hardware vendor, to corporate, to retail sales, and training.  I have however left out one very important aspect of my industry experience… And that is that I have been a wireless handset user myself. At this point you are probably asking yourself where I am going with all of this.