Massive deployment of high-speed wireless networks throughout the world has opened up a new market for telecom outsourcing and managed services for several telecom equipment manufacturing firms. The next-generation (3G/4G) wireless networks are aiming to cope with substantial demand for high-speed wireless data services and mobile video.
Telecom service providers are now typically looking at providing the converged IP-based network, offering bundled solutions for triple play voice, video and data. This requires the implementation of complex network architecture.
The telecom outsourcing market generally includes network implementation & maintenance, system integration & managed services, and consulting. In order to minimize their costs, carriers try to concentrate on developing new services, implement a service-oriented business model and marketing.
The market for basic network operation is increasingly seeing the entry of infrastructure suppliers. This generates a huge opportunity for telecom equipment manufacturers to encash.
According to various industry researches, the approximate global size of this market is likely to be between $250 billion - $275 billion. Asia alone is expected to generate 25% of the total.
As of now, the undisputed leader in the telecom managed services market is LM Ericsson AB (ERIC). Nokia-Siemens Network; a joint venture between Nokia Corp (NOK) & Siemens AG (SI), and Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) are the two closest rivals.
During the first half of 2009, these three entities won 20 large managed services deals across the world. Currently, Ericsson generates approximately $2.8 billion of quarterly revenue through managed services, whereas Nokia-Siemens Network generates around $2 billion and Alcatel-Lucent generates around $1.25 billion of quarterly revenue.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Introduction to Telecom Expense Management
By Anup Abraham
Introduction
You are probably thinking: "telecom expense management, what on earth is telecom expense management?" It's a good thing that we did not start this article with the acronym "TEM" because you would have been even more lost.
So, telecom expense management, or TEM for short - why do you care enough to read further?
Today enterprises rely on an extensive network of voice, data and wireless services to conduct business. These services cost any enterprise an enormous amount of money. To make matters even more confusing, the telecommunications service provider environment is complex and constantly changing with mergers, new vendors and changing services.
Large enterprises face challenges managing this dynamic environment and controlling these. Telecom expense management is a disciplined process for managing telecommunications and telecommunications expenses that can help any enterprise to save substantial amounts of money - potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars (now that should have caught your attention and made you want to read further). A successful TEM process enables organizations to evaluate, simplify and manage complex telecom expenditures. This article will describe TEM and the issues it solves, and of course, how it can save you money.
Telecom Expense Management is a Process
To manage telecom services and telecommunications costs, companies have implemented a process known as Telecom Expense Management, or TEM. TEM is an end-to-end business process intended to manage the entire telecom lifecycle, which includes but is not limited to the following:
So now it is time to "show you the money"...
Generally accepted industry data indicate that as much 10% to 12% of telecommunications charges are erroneous. Most of the errors (85%) are in the telecom vendor's favor. This means that the typical company is spending 8 to 10% more than they need to on the telecommunications services!
Automation to Make it Easy
If saving the money is not enough incentive on its own, the efficiency gains should be enough. The process does not have to be an onerous one. A company can automate the process by employing a telecom expense management solution. An automated solution serves as the central information repository incorporating the company data collected as well as telecom bills which are accepted electronically. It then does the "heavy lifting" by helping to reconcile bills and services identifying the areas of discrepancy.
Conclusion
Telecom expense management serves a critical function within any organization helping them to manage their telecom expenses while providing visibility and actionable insight into the entire procurement-to-payment process. The process can be automated to make it relatively easy, and in the end will save any organization substantial amounts of money. Easy and saving money - what's not to like?
About the Author
Anup Abraham is a Manager at ExcelaCom, Inc. and provides consulting services to major telecos.
Introduction
You are probably thinking: "telecom expense management, what on earth is telecom expense management?" It's a good thing that we did not start this article with the acronym "TEM" because you would have been even more lost.
So, telecom expense management, or TEM for short - why do you care enough to read further?
Today enterprises rely on an extensive network of voice, data and wireless services to conduct business. These services cost any enterprise an enormous amount of money. To make matters even more confusing, the telecommunications service provider environment is complex and constantly changing with mergers, new vendors and changing services.
Large enterprises face challenges managing this dynamic environment and controlling these. Telecom expense management is a disciplined process for managing telecommunications and telecommunications expenses that can help any enterprise to save substantial amounts of money - potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars (now that should have caught your attention and made you want to read further). A successful TEM process enables organizations to evaluate, simplify and manage complex telecom expenditures. This article will describe TEM and the issues it solves, and of course, how it can save you money.
Telecom Expense Management is a Process
To manage telecom services and telecommunications costs, companies have implemented a process known as Telecom Expense Management, or TEM. TEM is an end-to-end business process intended to manage the entire telecom lifecycle, which includes but is not limited to the following:
- Ordering and procuring telecom services
- Managing an inventory of telecom services while tying them back to locations and people
- Billing management including bill processing, auditing and reconciliation
- Contract management and validation
- Paying for services
- Effectively manage the inventory of services to locations and workers who are geographically dispersed
- Optimize the entire telecom infrastructure
- Identify errors in telecom billing (most of which are in the carriers favor) leading to refunds
- Obtain the most advantageous pricing when sourcing telecom services
- Collecting information about telecom accounts, locations, and employees
- Converting the data into an electronic format so that it may be easily managed and maintained
- Determining if problems are caused internally (the fault of the company) or externally (the fault of the carrier)
- Enforcing existing company policies or creating new processes to deal with internal issues
- Obtaining credits from telecom carriers for erroneous billing
So now it is time to "show you the money"...
Generally accepted industry data indicate that as much 10% to 12% of telecommunications charges are erroneous. Most of the errors (85%) are in the telecom vendor's favor. This means that the typical company is spending 8 to 10% more than they need to on the telecommunications services!
Automation to Make it Easy
If saving the money is not enough incentive on its own, the efficiency gains should be enough. The process does not have to be an onerous one. A company can automate the process by employing a telecom expense management solution. An automated solution serves as the central information repository incorporating the company data collected as well as telecom bills which are accepted electronically. It then does the "heavy lifting" by helping to reconcile bills and services identifying the areas of discrepancy.
Conclusion
Telecom expense management serves a critical function within any organization helping them to manage their telecom expenses while providing visibility and actionable insight into the entire procurement-to-payment process. The process can be automated to make it relatively easy, and in the end will save any organization substantial amounts of money. Easy and saving money - what's not to like?
About the Author
Anup Abraham is a Manager at ExcelaCom, Inc. and provides consulting services to major telecos.
Have to cut heads to control costs? Think again.
The thousands of enterprise CIOs who have been tasked with cutting costs next year are facing a gloomy outlook of layoffs now more than ever. We've already seen massive layoffs across the world. But this is just the tip of the iceberg; departmental heads will need to do a lot more to control their budgets in 2009.
But before embarking on a plan to terminate significant slices of your workforce, consider ways you can eliminate pure waste. Such an area is telecommunications.
From what I hear from my own customers, the initial reaction to the task of getting a grip on your telecom is overwhelming. I would say this is true; it's a significant undertaking. But, as with any process, experience makes it perfectly achievable. Practice makes perfect, as they say. Having to spend money to avoid an uncontrollable spend may seem ironic, but companies need to make investments and dedicate staff to control costs and eliminate cutting valuable assets, like your employees.
As for telecom, things such as wireless devices and phones are simply a must for companies, and no CIO who manages a huge sales force would want to suffer any degradation in service. After all, telecom is the primary business tool. A software solution for managing costs is not enough. To expect to be able to effectively execute a project that involves sanitizing an enormous inventory, consolidating tens of millions of dollars of billing and building an efficient ongoing management process in the course, requires dedication, cooperation and pure hard work. Is it worth it? Absolutely - you will save heaps.
I've seen companies save millions purely by eliminating invoice waste. Just this month, a global IT company that historically paid $100 million in telecom each year, saved $6.5 million in telecom bills, within the first 8 months of implementing project. Their projections suggest that the company's additional savings during the next six months will likely exceed $20 or even $30 million. So, imagine the possibility of reducing costs by over 20 percent, just by checking your bills more thoroughly.
Telecom bills and infrastructure is an enormously complex collection of information. None of the elements naturally tie together. Finance departments deal with accounts and contracts, and IT departments deal with circuits and wireless devices - they don't match. Nonetheless, the accounts that you pay are for the myriad of telecom services you use, so this mismatch should not be ignored because the chances of them matching by accident is nil.
Here's another scenario: Who would issue pay checks to 10,000 people without knowing that they haven't been terminated - your HR department would check against a register, right? But imagine this: One huge invoice for a million dollars arrives from AT&T. It contains hundreds of thousands of line items at a few cents or dollars each. In honesty, how can you imagine paying for this without checking the accuracy of it? But you pay the bill anyway to avoid service disruption. Why doesn't this stringent HR type of reconciliation occur with telecom? Easy: it's too hard.
But it's not too hard if you follow a proven process and computers to do it for you. It can be automated and become 100 percent accurate. You would never have to pay for a service you don't need again.
So, when you are tasked with cutting costs and begin counting heads, take a look at the size of your phone bill first and imagine how many employees you would be able to save if you could reduce it by 10 - 20 percent, permanently and streamline your management for free.
But before embarking on a plan to terminate significant slices of your workforce, consider ways you can eliminate pure waste. Such an area is telecommunications.
From what I hear from my own customers, the initial reaction to the task of getting a grip on your telecom is overwhelming. I would say this is true; it's a significant undertaking. But, as with any process, experience makes it perfectly achievable. Practice makes perfect, as they say. Having to spend money to avoid an uncontrollable spend may seem ironic, but companies need to make investments and dedicate staff to control costs and eliminate cutting valuable assets, like your employees.
As for telecom, things such as wireless devices and phones are simply a must for companies, and no CIO who manages a huge sales force would want to suffer any degradation in service. After all, telecom is the primary business tool. A software solution for managing costs is not enough. To expect to be able to effectively execute a project that involves sanitizing an enormous inventory, consolidating tens of millions of dollars of billing and building an efficient ongoing management process in the course, requires dedication, cooperation and pure hard work. Is it worth it? Absolutely - you will save heaps.
I've seen companies save millions purely by eliminating invoice waste. Just this month, a global IT company that historically paid $100 million in telecom each year, saved $6.5 million in telecom bills, within the first 8 months of implementing project. Their projections suggest that the company's additional savings during the next six months will likely exceed $20 or even $30 million. So, imagine the possibility of reducing costs by over 20 percent, just by checking your bills more thoroughly.
Telecom bills and infrastructure is an enormously complex collection of information. None of the elements naturally tie together. Finance departments deal with accounts and contracts, and IT departments deal with circuits and wireless devices - they don't match. Nonetheless, the accounts that you pay are for the myriad of telecom services you use, so this mismatch should not be ignored because the chances of them matching by accident is nil.
Here's another scenario: Who would issue pay checks to 10,000 people without knowing that they haven't been terminated - your HR department would check against a register, right? But imagine this: One huge invoice for a million dollars arrives from AT&T. It contains hundreds of thousands of line items at a few cents or dollars each. In honesty, how can you imagine paying for this without checking the accuracy of it? But you pay the bill anyway to avoid service disruption. Why doesn't this stringent HR type of reconciliation occur with telecom? Easy: it's too hard.
But it's not too hard if you follow a proven process and computers to do it for you. It can be automated and become 100 percent accurate. You would never have to pay for a service you don't need again.
So, when you are tasked with cutting costs and begin counting heads, take a look at the size of your phone bill first and imagine how many employees you would be able to save if you could reduce it by 10 - 20 percent, permanently and streamline your management for free.
The Dreaded Enterprise Phone Bill
By Brian Rafferty
The dreaded phone bill. Some people see it as a waste of paper. Some see it as a huge headache. And some understand it to be nothing more than a payment amount and a list of calls made. But, at a large company with a lot of employees, this bill is much more complicated, even if it's only accounting for landlines.
What if your company gives every employee a mobile phone and sets up a virtual private network in some employees' homes? Each of these services adds an additional layer of complication, making it more difficult to discover billing errors and audit your inventory.
A telecom bill contains an overwhelming amount of information, making it nearly impossible for managers to review and verify every expense item for each of their employees. Not to mention dealing with a multitude of carrier disks or the manual entry of paper invoices. Even with armies of staff spending endless hours checking and reconciling telecom bills, allocating charges and monitoring for new and cancelled services, mistakes and errors continue to occur. Many companies have no surefire solution to completely verify they're actually getting the best bang for their buck.
In addition, billing errors and inaccurate inventory audits are small problems compared to those caused by ineffective provisioning policies and overpriced carrier contracts.
How It Can Go Wrong
Have you ever lost track of your home phone bill and ended up paying twice as much? You can easily catch this error and balance your finances, but, for larger organizations handling a number of duplicate charges, catching errors in a timely manner is not nearly as easy. It gets even more complicated when an employee leaves the company.
So, what happens when an employee quits or is laid off? Does HR contact your team so that their mobile phone, landline and VPN services can immediately be canceled? Let's be honest here. If your team is contacted at all, it is likely that the employee has been gone for some time.
While TEM suppliers produce different estimates, they approximate that between five and 15 percent of the telecom expenses incurred are the result of billing errors, such as duplicate charges and charges for services that have been canceled. While these billing errors can add up quickly, they represent a short-term problem compared with the total telecom expenses a company can face as a result of inefficient management.
Some companies recognize the impact of these short-term expenses and have a team of workers to reconcile billing errors and other discrepancies. Other companies attempt to reduce the size of their bill by hopping from carrier to carrier or bundling services. In reality, these strategies are no more than a quick fix. While these Band-Aids can reduce telecom bills, this short-term approach glosses over the underlying problems that exposed your company to escalating costs in the first place. In the end, they create additional problems.
Suppose that you have been asked to meet with the board of directors about the current state of the company's telecom operations. The scramble begins. To prepare for the meeting, you have your staff focus all its attention on an inventory audit as well as searching for and reconciling incorrect billing expenses. Your group is extremely busy sifting through thousands of pages of telecom records and data. As a result, your sourcing manager forgets that a major carrier contract needs to be renewed and it expires. A significant portion of your company's sales force loses mobile access. While the sourcing manager scrambles to secure a new contract, your sales force must operate in the dark, wasting countless hours of time and missing revenue-generating opportunities. It sounds like a nightmare but unfortunately, it does happen.
Telecom Usage Analysis
Let's look into how companies are breaking the cycle and taking control. Companies can reduce the cost of their telecom infrastructure in a resourceful, long-term way. They can conduct a strategic review of their entire telecom management process and focus on employee needs and carrier contracts.
Through careful research and analysis of which employees have access to and use a company's telecom tools, the telecom manager can design an effective provisioning policy to reduce expenses without jeopardizing essential services. Let's say that half of your company's employees currently have a company mobile phone and another quarter have a company BlackBerry. It is safe to say that some of these employees do not need a mobile phone or a BlackBerry to fulfill the requirements of their positions. After identifying these unnecessary expenses, you can easily trim some fat from the telecom budget. Since companies are constantly evolving and employee requirements often change, it is important to conduct periodic provisioning reviews.
This analysis of employee telecom usage is also essential when negotiating with carriers to source the best telecom contract. By understanding which telecom services are necessary and for which employees, you can negotiate a carrier contract that excludes needless or redundant services. In combination with industry benchmarking and a review of previous program costs, this information can help managers select a service provider that offers the right capabilities at the right price.
While provisioning and sourcing can help to solve fundamental problems that escalate telecom expenses, a telecom team often doesn't have the time to conduct this analysis. With a workforce of thousands, it is impossible for them to sift through data pertaining to each employee's mobile usage and determine who does and does not need these services.
By breaking this bulky bill down into individual expense items, it is easy to reduce a company's telecom expenses and streamline its telecom operational review. Unfortunately, without a system to read and analyze the data, breaking it down is not easy.
While small companies may prefer to employ a single staff member to manually breakdown the enterprise telecom bill, a company with a thousand employees can save time and manpower by employing a telecom expense management (TEM) system, which automatically breaks down the bill for easy analysis. In addition to identifying billing errors, TEM systems make it easy to determine exactly where your company's telecom expenses are coming from, how frequently services are being used and by which departments.
With an itemized listing of expenses, a TEM system provides the necessary data to create a new telecom strategy, which can generate long-term savings. By understanding the specific expenses a company is incurring and where they are originating, telecom managers can pinpoint unnecessary expenses and adjust their provisioning policies.
Whether a company implements a TEM system or hires employees to manage the enterprise telecom bill, breaking down the bill will give it the tools necessary to reduce the cost of telecom services without jeopardizing their functionality.
How Telecom Inefficiencies Can Damage a Company's Bottom Line
The dreaded phone bill. Some people see it as a waste of paper. Some see it as a huge headache. And some understand it to be nothing more than a payment amount and a list of calls made. But, at a large company with a lot of employees, this bill is much more complicated, even if it's only accounting for landlines.
What if your company gives every employee a mobile phone and sets up a virtual private network in some employees' homes? Each of these services adds an additional layer of complication, making it more difficult to discover billing errors and audit your inventory.
A telecom bill contains an overwhelming amount of information, making it nearly impossible for managers to review and verify every expense item for each of their employees. Not to mention dealing with a multitude of carrier disks or the manual entry of paper invoices. Even with armies of staff spending endless hours checking and reconciling telecom bills, allocating charges and monitoring for new and cancelled services, mistakes and errors continue to occur. Many companies have no surefire solution to completely verify they're actually getting the best bang for their buck.
In addition, billing errors and inaccurate inventory audits are small problems compared to those caused by ineffective provisioning policies and overpriced carrier contracts.
How It Can Go Wrong
Have you ever lost track of your home phone bill and ended up paying twice as much? You can easily catch this error and balance your finances, but, for larger organizations handling a number of duplicate charges, catching errors in a timely manner is not nearly as easy. It gets even more complicated when an employee leaves the company.
So, what happens when an employee quits or is laid off? Does HR contact your team so that their mobile phone, landline and VPN services can immediately be canceled? Let's be honest here. If your team is contacted at all, it is likely that the employee has been gone for some time.
While TEM suppliers produce different estimates, they approximate that between five and 15 percent of the telecom expenses incurred are the result of billing errors, such as duplicate charges and charges for services that have been canceled. While these billing errors can add up quickly, they represent a short-term problem compared with the total telecom expenses a company can face as a result of inefficient management.
Some companies recognize the impact of these short-term expenses and have a team of workers to reconcile billing errors and other discrepancies. Other companies attempt to reduce the size of their bill by hopping from carrier to carrier or bundling services. In reality, these strategies are no more than a quick fix. While these Band-Aids can reduce telecom bills, this short-term approach glosses over the underlying problems that exposed your company to escalating costs in the first place. In the end, they create additional problems.
Suppose that you have been asked to meet with the board of directors about the current state of the company's telecom operations. The scramble begins. To prepare for the meeting, you have your staff focus all its attention on an inventory audit as well as searching for and reconciling incorrect billing expenses. Your group is extremely busy sifting through thousands of pages of telecom records and data. As a result, your sourcing manager forgets that a major carrier contract needs to be renewed and it expires. A significant portion of your company's sales force loses mobile access. While the sourcing manager scrambles to secure a new contract, your sales force must operate in the dark, wasting countless hours of time and missing revenue-generating opportunities. It sounds like a nightmare but unfortunately, it does happen.
Telecom Usage Analysis
Let's look into how companies are breaking the cycle and taking control. Companies can reduce the cost of their telecom infrastructure in a resourceful, long-term way. They can conduct a strategic review of their entire telecom management process and focus on employee needs and carrier contracts.
Through careful research and analysis of which employees have access to and use a company's telecom tools, the telecom manager can design an effective provisioning policy to reduce expenses without jeopardizing essential services. Let's say that half of your company's employees currently have a company mobile phone and another quarter have a company BlackBerry. It is safe to say that some of these employees do not need a mobile phone or a BlackBerry to fulfill the requirements of their positions. After identifying these unnecessary expenses, you can easily trim some fat from the telecom budget. Since companies are constantly evolving and employee requirements often change, it is important to conduct periodic provisioning reviews.
This analysis of employee telecom usage is also essential when negotiating with carriers to source the best telecom contract. By understanding which telecom services are necessary and for which employees, you can negotiate a carrier contract that excludes needless or redundant services. In combination with industry benchmarking and a review of previous program costs, this information can help managers select a service provider that offers the right capabilities at the right price.
While provisioning and sourcing can help to solve fundamental problems that escalate telecom expenses, a telecom team often doesn't have the time to conduct this analysis. With a workforce of thousands, it is impossible for them to sift through data pertaining to each employee's mobile usage and determine who does and does not need these services.
By breaking this bulky bill down into individual expense items, it is easy to reduce a company's telecom expenses and streamline its telecom operational review. Unfortunately, without a system to read and analyze the data, breaking it down is not easy.
While small companies may prefer to employ a single staff member to manually breakdown the enterprise telecom bill, a company with a thousand employees can save time and manpower by employing a telecom expense management (TEM) system, which automatically breaks down the bill for easy analysis. In addition to identifying billing errors, TEM systems make it easy to determine exactly where your company's telecom expenses are coming from, how frequently services are being used and by which departments.
With an itemized listing of expenses, a TEM system provides the necessary data to create a new telecom strategy, which can generate long-term savings. By understanding the specific expenses a company is incurring and where they are originating, telecom managers can pinpoint unnecessary expenses and adjust their provisioning policies.
Whether a company implements a TEM system or hires employees to manage the enterprise telecom bill, breaking down the bill will give it the tools necessary to reduce the cost of telecom services without jeopardizing their functionality.
Telecom Expenses - The Million-Dollar Disconnect
By Jennifer Gartland
The Disconnect
Captain Obvious says, "Newsflash! Nearly all corporations suffer from a lack of internal communication and processes! Effective collaboration and employee accountability are NOT the norm!"
In a perfect corporate setting, everyone works well together and they communicate effectively with each other. Unfortunately for most, if your employees are talking to each other, it's around the water cooler and usually involves last night's episode of The Flight of the Conchords.
We all know this but this lack of communication rings true especially when it comes to the IT, Finance and Procurement groups in a company (yes, even your company). Getting these groups to work cohesively is one of the most difficult of tasks when managing your company's telecom expenses. "So what", you say? So, this problem can be equating to an overpayment of up to 25% on telecom bills alone. Let's put that into perspective:
Your car payment of $400 - toss another $100 on there each month
Your mortgage payment of $3000 - a mistake costs you $750 here too
Your son's tuition bill of $20,000 - you won't miss that extra $4000, will you?
You won't mind a mark-up of $1200 on your new flat screen TV when the bill arrives.
If you ran into any of these problems, you would immediately start making calls to fix the mistake. The same goes with your company's telecom billing. So here is where I am going to help you figure it out without having to make a number of calls to customer service just to get put on hold.
Getting to the bottom of it
Your IT, Finance, and Procurement groups are focused on different areas within their respective roles. The IT group deals with the infrastructure. They ensure the phones are working, everyone has internet access and the new COO's cell phone is ordered. While the Procurement group is focused on making sure contracts are renewed. The Finance group is trying to pay the invoices on time, coding the charges and synching up with the general ledger, leaving little or no time to analyze bills. On top of all of this, these groups use at least 3 separate systems that each have their own set of dynamics. All of these components can cause a mismatch in inventory against bills anywhere from 19-24%.
How is this disconnect affecting me?
You know that your telecom management process has holes in it. Hundreds of companies are facing the same issue. So let's take a look at how this affects companies like you and how it impacts the bottom line. Some commonplace issues include:
How are other companies handling these issues?
In 2003, CSC, a leading global information technology (IT) services company, began searching for a solution for its internal telecom operation as well as a future external TEM offering. The annual internal telecom spend at the time was approximately $60M internally in addition to managing over $500M in customer's telecom bills. Bills were being managed manually with spreadsheets and the invoices were received in a combination of electronic and hard copy formats.
CSC's TEM process was extremely labor-intensive. Besides the large amounts of man-hours taken to manually enter telecom data and the lack of communication between IT, Finance and HR departments, there were several key factors that hindered the process:
When CSC decided to go with a software partner that would meet the challenge to help service its large client base, they immediately started to see results. Within the first few weeks of using a centralized solution for all of their departments, they discovered and cancelled over $1 million in active services for a location that had been closed for 2 years.
CSC now offers their clients a savings of up to 30% on their telecom cost. They reduced the time spent managing their expenditure, effectively allocated resources to proper cost centers, reconciled telecom bills, and eliminated conflict errors from carriers and incorrectly applied tariffs.
Bridging the Gap - Where do I start?
Can you imagine if you saved over a $1 million for your company? I can! So, how do I get to the point where I am carried on everyone's shoulders and hailed as employee of the month?
I know you probably get a cold call a day from TEM suppliers, so you already know that there are a number of TEM solutions from Software to Outsourcing. What you might not know is where to start. You have identified that there is a problem that needs to be fixed. The first step is completed, but now it's your job to understand the current environment and challenges before deciding on a TEM solution.
There are a number of outlets that will help you create and maintain a successful TEM project.
Ta-da! The groundwork has been laid. Once all of the steps above have been accomplished and you have researched the best options for your team, you will be in a position to implement any TEM solution. Now is the time to hurry up! You're probably losing money on a daily basis. Do you want your CFO asking you how it happened or do you want to be the one who fixed it?
The Disconnect
Captain Obvious says, "Newsflash! Nearly all corporations suffer from a lack of internal communication and processes! Effective collaboration and employee accountability are NOT the norm!"
In a perfect corporate setting, everyone works well together and they communicate effectively with each other. Unfortunately for most, if your employees are talking to each other, it's around the water cooler and usually involves last night's episode of The Flight of the Conchords.
We all know this but this lack of communication rings true especially when it comes to the IT, Finance and Procurement groups in a company (yes, even your company). Getting these groups to work cohesively is one of the most difficult of tasks when managing your company's telecom expenses. "So what", you say? So, this problem can be equating to an overpayment of up to 25% on telecom bills alone. Let's put that into perspective:
Your car payment of $400 - toss another $100 on there each month
Your mortgage payment of $3000 - a mistake costs you $750 here too
Your son's tuition bill of $20,000 - you won't miss that extra $4000, will you?
You won't mind a mark-up of $1200 on your new flat screen TV when the bill arrives.
If you ran into any of these problems, you would immediately start making calls to fix the mistake. The same goes with your company's telecom billing. So here is where I am going to help you figure it out without having to make a number of calls to customer service just to get put on hold.
Getting to the bottom of it
Your IT, Finance, and Procurement groups are focused on different areas within their respective roles. The IT group deals with the infrastructure. They ensure the phones are working, everyone has internet access and the new COO's cell phone is ordered. While the Procurement group is focused on making sure contracts are renewed. The Finance group is trying to pay the invoices on time, coding the charges and synching up with the general ledger, leaving little or no time to analyze bills. On top of all of this, these groups use at least 3 separate systems that each have their own set of dynamics. All of these components can cause a mismatch in inventory against bills anywhere from 19-24%.
How is this disconnect affecting me?
You know that your telecom management process has holes in it. Hundreds of companies are facing the same issue. So let's take a look at how this affects companies like you and how it impacts the bottom line. Some commonplace issues include:
- 10-12% of telecom invoice charges are wrong
- 85% of errors are in your carrier's favor
- +/- 20- service interruptions per year due to non-payment
- Under/over-utilized services further drain expenses
- People and places that are long-gone still have active telco services
- The competition is getting a 20% discount (and an edge) that you aren't getting.
- Well-negotiated contract rates often do not make it to the bill and you can't tell.
How are other companies handling these issues?
In 2003, CSC, a leading global information technology (IT) services company, began searching for a solution for its internal telecom operation as well as a future external TEM offering. The annual internal telecom spend at the time was approximately $60M internally in addition to managing over $500M in customer's telecom bills. Bills were being managed manually with spreadsheets and the invoices were received in a combination of electronic and hard copy formats.
CSC's TEM process was extremely labor-intensive. Besides the large amounts of man-hours taken to manually enter telecom data and the lack of communication between IT, Finance and HR departments, there were several key factors that hindered the process:
- Inaccurate allocation of costs existed
- Poor method of managing inventory was prevalent
- Cost center charge backs were difficult to manage
- Bills were not reconciled correctly due to disparate systems
When CSC decided to go with a software partner that would meet the challenge to help service its large client base, they immediately started to see results. Within the first few weeks of using a centralized solution for all of their departments, they discovered and cancelled over $1 million in active services for a location that had been closed for 2 years.
CSC now offers their clients a savings of up to 30% on their telecom cost. They reduced the time spent managing their expenditure, effectively allocated resources to proper cost centers, reconciled telecom bills, and eliminated conflict errors from carriers and incorrectly applied tariffs.
Bridging the Gap - Where do I start?
Can you imagine if you saved over a $1 million for your company? I can! So, how do I get to the point where I am carried on everyone's shoulders and hailed as employee of the month?
I know you probably get a cold call a day from TEM suppliers, so you already know that there are a number of TEM solutions from Software to Outsourcing. What you might not know is where to start. You have identified that there is a problem that needs to be fixed. The first step is completed, but now it's your job to understand the current environment and challenges before deciding on a TEM solution.
- The first step to creating any new initiative is to identify your goals and what you want accomplished. For example, some goals may include:
- we are expanding globally and want to would like to enforce a global process
- we are looking to centralize management of telco expenses
- we will keep control locally
- we want visibility and accountability of expenses
- I want my team to receive the praise and recognition they deserve..(you may want to keep that goal to yourself)
- The next step is to understand your current TEM process. After breaking down the current process, 99% of the time, you need undergo some business process changes to become more efficient and eliminate waste. Here are some questions an organization should look to ask when examining their current process:
- Where do all the bills go today?
- Who manages the contracts with the carriers?
- How do costs get allocated for invoices now?
- Are wireless devices corporate billed or expensed?
- What financial reporting do we need to execute each month/period?
- What activity causes the most pain now?
- Who are the people who look after inventory (voice/data/wireless)?
- What systems do we have now to track the services?
- How do services get ordered, cancelled, changed?
- Where are all my services?
There are a number of outlets that will help you create and maintain a successful TEM project.
- Carriers -Contrary to popular belief, they are not the enemy. They are there to help and certainly do not want to jeopardize losing a client. Speak with them about getting bills in an electronic format, which can contain service numbers, service types, and physical service locations.
- Software providers -Software applications can help enforce corporate policies and a centralized database can store and analyze all internal data worldwide. No one knows the company and processes better than an organization's own people and an application enables them to keep control. An application will create efficiencies and exponential savings across the board.
- Managed Service providers - Are you the only one managing the entire process? Then talk to a service provider who can help you manage the work and take some of the pressure off of you. The key here though is choosing a service provider that has a solid software application powering their offer.
- Consultants - There are a number of consultants available who can assist in gathering information and provide invaluable advice on how to move forward on the project.
Ta-da! The groundwork has been laid. Once all of the steps above have been accomplished and you have researched the best options for your team, you will be in a position to implement any TEM solution. Now is the time to hurry up! You're probably losing money on a daily basis. Do you want your CFO asking you how it happened or do you want to be the one who fixed it?
Critical Requirements in a Global Telecommunication Expense Management Solution
Small world? It's still pretty big when it comes to Telecom Expense Management (TEM).
Your company is (or soon will be) global. Now you've been tasked with corralling your company's global telecommunications investment. It has senior-level visibility across the entire company. You're the Christopher Columbus of IT. He had it rough out there for a while and you may too. So hopefully this article will help you avoid some of the common problems associated with going for Global TEM.
Why even do it?
Why go through the struggles of synchronizing the myriad of processes, software, vendors and people? And is it worth it when you layer on the lingual, cultural and time-zone differences? For most, the answer is "absolutely". The two major goals are to increase your company's ability to make or save money without affecting quality. Efficiency gain, collaboration, visibility, and fiscal accountability are in there as well but they can easily be pointed back to the almighty Yen, Euro, Pound, and Dollar. And with the telecommunications investment up there (with compensation packages) as the highest line item expense, companies just like yours look at it as a windfall if done correctly.
What are realistic Global TEM
Global TEM capabilities vary wildly amongst the providers and we'll tell you why.
USA! USA!
Let's take a US-based TEM firm in New York or other metropolitan locale. Realistically the CEO and head of sales can look out a window and identify hundreds (thousands if the windows are clean and the skies clear) of prospects that need their product and services. The motivation to leave some states, never mind the country, may never materialize. There will always be local, massive corporations to pursue. For the customers that do have international locations, the TEM provider will be stretched to handle the additional business in a limited capacity. There are some exceptions, but that is usually the state of TEM providers founded and located in the US.
...! ...! (Singapore! Singapore!)
Now look out that same window in another market (Sydney or Singapore for example) and you may have a different story. The number of companies is now in the low hundreds and the smart CEO is thinking, "Everything I do is to help me win here AND to expand into other countries." Again, there are exceptions but that is the usual makeup for a company that was founded international and is still there or now based in the US (or both).
Point we're trying to make: Educate yourselves on what help is out there and set your goals accordingly.
Here are some realistic goals that a true Global TEM provider can help you with
Standard providers will support
- A single-database for all telco carrier information such as billing, inventory, contracts & provisioning activity. The system should support the consolidating of all expense and inventory types (i.e. landline AND mobile) and should have a healthy amount of electronic billing mappers (better than paper bills) for international telco carriers. How to validate: Get a demo of the software they use and ask for a list of bill mappers by continent and you'll know quickly.
- Audits of your telco carrier information against your list of locations and users. How to validate: Discuss integration with HR and premises database and how that info is used. Have them show you where location and HR data is fed and stored for all countries in the system and reports.
- Integration with your GL and chargeback system(s) for payment instructions. When providers pass along chargeback/payment details to accounting they typically customize the feeds into file formats such as Excel. How to validate: Talk to a reference and ask them how payment details are getting sent over and how they're handling multiple accounting systems for international locations.
- Visibility across inventory, spend, contract & MACD activity in dashboard reports. How to validate: Specifically look for the integration of landline and mobile service types in the inventory reports, the currency indicators in the spend reports (if there's a "$" in the reports it was probably designed for US use), and discuss how currency updates are coordinated.
- Conversion of most paper billing into electronic data formats. Just because they can provide a large list of mappers doesn't mean they're especially good at supporting them (when the carriers change them without notice and the system breaks) or building new ones (when the carrier releases new products). How to validate: Discuss SLA's around updates and how they charge for new ones. A true Global TEM provider will have aggressive time frames to fix format changes and will build new ones as part of a special maintenance program.
Exceptional providers will also support
- Non-English character support for billing. This is especially important for AsiaPac deployments that use symbols such as Kanji. And although most mainland Asia billing can be converted to English, expansion into areas such as Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Taiwan can be hampered without this ability.
- 24X7 support options. True Global TEM providers will have a few non-US locations to eliminate the time zone challenges around deployment and support services.
- Advanced encryption of databases. The ability to wrap additional layers of encryption around data storage and transmission will be especially important in the EMEA region, where the EU Data Privacy guidelines are the legal reality. See Safe Harbor in next section for more detail.
- Engagements with non-US companies. Companies that are US-based and have an international presence are one thing but when your TEM provider can connect you to customers that have been successfully deployed and serviced in an purely international location, you're in good hands.
- Experience in global process deployments. You should not have to develop the strategy for deploying TEM services simultaneously in AsiaPac, South America & the UK. The Global TEM provider should, with confidence, call up numerous deployments that fit your goals.
- Multi-lingual staff. "Esto aumentará el nivel de confort de esos lugares que pueden ser nuevas para la experiencia TEM" (This will increase the comfort level of those locations that may be new to the TEM experience). Also, you can have the best local support available.
- Itemized charge storage for tax break-outs. Whether it's USF for US, PST/GST for Canada or VAT taxes for the UK, the ability to store and break out taxes for coding and credits is a capability you can and should expect in today's market. The telco carrier's billing side may need some work but the software should have ample storage for a detailed breakout of these charges.
Crème de la Crème providers will also maintain
- Safe Harbor status – There are less than a ½ dozen providers that have gone through the technical and legal process of gaining this status. It is an increasing "must-have" by any company with a UK presence. The Safe Harbor framework calls for "adequate protection" of personal data transferred from Europe to the U.S. as required by the European Union's Directive on Data Protection (EU Directive). The EU Directive prohibits the transfer of personal data to non-EU nations that do not meet the European adequacy standard for privacy protection.
- In English: You cannot store or transfer personal data related to TEM, including individual employee IDs, invoices and other personally identifiable information from the UK to the US without this certification. It frazzles the lawyers.
- International locations (non-partner) – There are many firms in the TEM landscape with international partners. There is no guarantee they've actually worked together beyond establishing their partnership and created any synergies that you'll actually benefit from. If you come do across a provider with international locations that are in the same company, you can be assured your priorities are their priorities as well.
Summary
We hope the above information will be a useful compass as your global strategy is being developed. You can implement a successful Global TEM solution. Choosing the right TEM provider will make it easier.
About the Author
Louis Crespo is the VP of Marketing of Quickcomm Software. Louis Crespo is responsible for marketing, new product development and industry analysis for Quickcomm. Louis has more than ten years of experience in both sales and technology roles in the telecom expense management field.
Its not Telecom Expense Management, its Telecom Management
The common misperception with Telecom Expense Management is that its primary purpose is to manage the overwhelming quantity of complex and voluminous invoices that need to be paid each month.
Its not!
Let me draw a parallel. Suppose I have a small business that leases 5 cars. Each car costs $1,000 per month plus mileage used. A single invoice arrives once a month and the detail shows the costs for the 5 cars, each identified by the license plate and representing a component of the overall monthly total.
When trying to determine if the invoice is correct, I check with each of my drivers and confirm they still have the car and they accrued the miles detailed on the invoice. Effectively, the invoice itself becomes irrelevant. I need to make sure that I get the value or service from the cars - not the invoice itself.
The telecommunications world is similar to the car scenario, but far more massive. As a consequence we don't have a hope of looking at all the detail and simply elect to check only the front page of each invoice. What have we done? We have moved from paying for the services we use to paying invoices with no real visibility into what they contain. This is a crime!
Each invoice contains the thousands of individual Services that I get from my provider. Each Service attracts recurring charges for the service, plus charges for volume of usage (usually calls). Each of these charges is then further broken down into its component parts and categories resulting in each individual service consume dozens of pages of detail. For a sizeable invoice billing hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, the quantity of these services becomes so large that without a dedicated system, they are simply not going to get checked.
Think of the parallel with the 5 cars. To check each service is correct, I would have to itemize each one and its charges and then refer to the user within my corporation and ask them to check it. In the enterprise telecommunications world, this is usually the IT group.
This is a very relevant point isn't it? For the most part in large organizations, the finance group pays invoices and the IT group use the services. Does finance go and ask IT to check every line item in the invoices they pay every month? Of course not. The result therefore is that invoice are being paid by people without the expertise or information they need to verify them.
The results are obvious. Invoices get bigger and bigger and more and more unwieldy and the percentage of error in them gets bigger and bigger. The outcome is clear - the phone bill is wrong by 10%, 20% or perhaps higher.
What can you do?
It's a question of looking at the problem properly. There is normally a complete disconnect between the IT group and the finance group. Not only are they driven by different objectives; finance need to pay bills and IT need to keep the infrastructure going; but additionally they have quite different skill sets and speak different languages. To compound this, they are dealing with different objects. Finance has a list of thousands of account numbers they deal with and the IT group has tens of thousands of services.
To address the issue, you need to create the flow of information between IT and Finance.
How?
Clearly the issue cannot be resolved with mountains of paper invoices - It is just too much information.
Fortunately invoices can be readily received in electronic form. These invoices contain all the services information that comprise the total invoice (the 5 cars) and all their detail charges. This information is worthless to the finance person, but is exactly what the IT group will understand. So therefore if the information about services the IT group naturally hold to be able to do their job can be compared to charges on the invoice, then you have reconciliation!
Now that we have electronic invoices, this reconciling can be done with software. Features need to include:
Easy.. Once the inventory is being reconciled against billing automatically each month, it will highlight discrepancies:
Services on the bills that
Summary
Don't get caught in the trap of just outsourcing the whole mess. There are quality TEM outsourcers out there who are very experienced with telco billing, but regardless of their expertise they clearly need to understand your inventory as well as your IT group does. Ask your potential provider how the moves adds and changes will get to them and update their inventory. The answer is important.
Question whether being able to automate through dedicated software in house would mean the task becomes quite manageable enough to do it yourself.
In a nutshell - whichever path you follow, aim to stop paying invoices and pay for what you need.
It isn't Telecom Expense Management you need to address - its Telecom Management.
Its not!
Let me draw a parallel. Suppose I have a small business that leases 5 cars. Each car costs $1,000 per month plus mileage used. A single invoice arrives once a month and the detail shows the costs for the 5 cars, each identified by the license plate and representing a component of the overall monthly total.
When trying to determine if the invoice is correct, I check with each of my drivers and confirm they still have the car and they accrued the miles detailed on the invoice. Effectively, the invoice itself becomes irrelevant. I need to make sure that I get the value or service from the cars - not the invoice itself.
The telecommunications world is similar to the car scenario, but far more massive. As a consequence we don't have a hope of looking at all the detail and simply elect to check only the front page of each invoice. What have we done? We have moved from paying for the services we use to paying invoices with no real visibility into what they contain. This is a crime!
Each invoice contains the thousands of individual Services that I get from my provider. Each Service attracts recurring charges for the service, plus charges for volume of usage (usually calls). Each of these charges is then further broken down into its component parts and categories resulting in each individual service consume dozens of pages of detail. For a sizeable invoice billing hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, the quantity of these services becomes so large that without a dedicated system, they are simply not going to get checked.
Think of the parallel with the 5 cars. To check each service is correct, I would have to itemize each one and its charges and then refer to the user within my corporation and ask them to check it. In the enterprise telecommunications world, this is usually the IT group.
This is a very relevant point isn't it? For the most part in large organizations, the finance group pays invoices and the IT group use the services. Does finance go and ask IT to check every line item in the invoices they pay every month? Of course not. The result therefore is that invoice are being paid by people without the expertise or information they need to verify them.
The results are obvious. Invoices get bigger and bigger and more and more unwieldy and the percentage of error in them gets bigger and bigger. The outcome is clear - the phone bill is wrong by 10%, 20% or perhaps higher.
What can you do?
It's a question of looking at the problem properly. There is normally a complete disconnect between the IT group and the finance group. Not only are they driven by different objectives; finance need to pay bills and IT need to keep the infrastructure going; but additionally they have quite different skill sets and speak different languages. To compound this, they are dealing with different objects. Finance has a list of thousands of account numbers they deal with and the IT group has tens of thousands of services.
To address the issue, you need to create the flow of information between IT and Finance.
How?
Clearly the issue cannot be resolved with mountains of paper invoices - It is just too much information.
Fortunately invoices can be readily received in electronic form. These invoices contain all the services information that comprise the total invoice (the 5 cars) and all their detail charges. This information is worthless to the finance person, but is exactly what the IT group will understand. So therefore if the information about services the IT group naturally hold to be able to do their job can be compared to charges on the invoice, then you have reconciliation!
Now that we have electronic invoices, this reconciling can be done with software. Features need to include:
- The ability for IT group to house all services (cellphones, data circuits, voice circuits, air cards, etc.) and their details in a centralized database. What is it? What do I use it for? Who pays for it? Where is it located? And so on. This is your inventory - it's what you need to run your business.
- The ability to keep this information up to date. The solution must handle Moves, Adds, Changes and Deletions so that every event is captured and keeps the inventory up to date and trustworthy.
- The ability to hold contract information. "AT&T agreed that I would be charged this schedule of charges for the services in my inventory provided I spend $1m a year with them."
- The ability to import and break down all of the invoices I get from my service providers and have the system compare the components against the trustworthy inventory that the IT group maintains.
- The ability to receive information from other systems such as the HR system. "All of these cellphones that are on this invoice belong to these employees and the HR system confirms that they are still active.
Easy.. Once the inventory is being reconciled against billing automatically each month, it will highlight discrepancies:
Services on the bills that
- don't exist in the enterprise
- that have been cancelled
- that are at locations since closed
- that belong to employees since terminated
- that don't match the contract rates I agreed to pay.
Summary
Don't get caught in the trap of just outsourcing the whole mess. There are quality TEM outsourcers out there who are very experienced with telco billing, but regardless of their expertise they clearly need to understand your inventory as well as your IT group does. Ask your potential provider how the moves adds and changes will get to them and update their inventory. The answer is important.
Question whether being able to automate through dedicated software in house would mean the task becomes quite manageable enough to do it yourself.
In a nutshell - whichever path you follow, aim to stop paying invoices and pay for what you need.
It isn't Telecom Expense Management you need to address - its Telecom Management.
Telecom Expense Management - The Use of Software to Improve the Bottom Line
As organizations employ more remote employees and sales staff across the globe, the mobile devices these employees use as their corporate lifelines are creating numerous challenges for those charged with managing the rapidly expanding universe of telecom expenses. With new services that include voice, data, text, Internet, and video being added to bills, organizations are experiencing growing difficulties in managing the charges and in ensuring that erroneous errors do not occur. Managing the invoicing for tens of thousands of wireless devices requires specialized systems and processes to ensure that they are getting the best deal for a continually growing corporate cost.
Enter Telecom Expense Management (TEM). TEM solutions allow organizations to let software handle the complexities of millions of dollars in telecom charges each year. Many people think that TEM is a way of processing large invoices more efficiently and therefore, paying bills on time. But, in truth, such a definition misses the point. As organizations continue to evolve, telecom strategies have become far more complex than ever before. The result is a glaring need for telecom management platforms that go beyond invoice management and help companies manage their telecom resources more holistically and in real-time. Effective TEM requires a strong combination of people, process, technology, and market intelligence.
Technological developments within the TEM industry are allowing organizations to analyze and process their telecom expenses more efficiently-and accurately. One development that has enabled software developers to integrate TEM software with their carrier’s billing internal methods is e-billing. Instead of receiving endless paper statements, carriers now send bills in electronic format and correspond directly with the TEM software to analyze the charges.
Increased automation allows organizations to see more information, reconcile inventory charges, validate contract rates and streamline the payment process. When all these processes are automated, management can concentrate on optimizing telecommunications investment and focus on their core competencies.
With consumers and organizations doing more business over the Internet than in previous years, online procurement is gaining favor as another way of utilizing technological developments to create a more efficient use of TEM software. Automation of procurement is a time-saving and efficient way of transmitting orders for moves, adds and changes (MACs) to vendors, creating less errors in ordering and keeping a better handle on inventory.
Software has also evolved to support an organization’s global footprint. Some TEM applications are Rich Internet Applications (RIA); in others words, they provide more functionality than HTML applications. They are easy to deploy, compatible with any browser and can be implemented globally, creating the ideal scenario to use the software to save valuable time and money.
Most organizations view software applications as an additional business expense. In this case, however, TEM software can save up to 20% of annual telecom bills by simply creating a more efficient, automated billing, procurement, payment and analysis processes, allowing organizations to focus on larger issues within their business. Additionally, global companies with employees across several countries each with diverse carriers, languages and telecom regulation, can benefit by implementing a uniform system across all locations to avoid costly mistakes. Bottom line: TEM software is no longer an investment, but a necessity for cost savings and greater visibility to the billions of dollars spent each year on telecommunications.
The Telecom Treasure Hunt
How to find easy money by organizing and validating your telecom service inventory.
By Mark Evans, CEO, Quickcomm Software Solutions
Introduction
This paper was developed from ideas put forth in a Quickcomm webinar by the same name. The goals of this paper are to help companies to:
- Learn how to create and maintain a clean telecommunications inventory
- Know where to go to get started with telecom expense management (TEM)
- Create an internal telecommunications evaluation process
- Understand what is driving their telecommunications expenses
- Make the best use of their own internal resources
The challenge is how to turn existing practices that "spot check" telecom expenses into a "best practice" process of ongoing telecommunications expense management. As with any such undertaking, where and how to start can be major stumbling blocks. There are issues of who is responsible for what and who owns the information, as well as how and where do companies store the information needed to truly and effectively manage telecommunications expenses.
What is the Nature of the Problem?
Many executives may wonder what the problem is in the first place. Is it important enough to warrant a lot of effort and resource? A few simple facts will help to illuminate the nature and the scope of the problem.
- 10-12% of telecommunication invoice charges are wrong!
- Of those, 85% of the errors are in the telecommunications carrier's favor.
Companies regularly under and over utilize services and still have active telecommunications services for people and places that are long gone.
Simple math is all that is necessary to realize that any substantial company is incurring telecommunications expenses that range from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars that they should not be paying.
Getting Started Means Collecting Information
For any company, the first step in getting telecommunications expenses under control is to collect the right information. The collection of data is a three stage process:
Stage 1: The company should collect account numbers with detail.
Stage 2: The company should breakdown and list "service numbers".
Stage 3: The company needs to gather information about locations including open and closed locations as well as historical and pending lease terms. From human resources (HR) they need to gather at least 3 years of records on active and terminated employees. Existing inventory, IT records, provisioning information, and cost/project codes should also be gathered.
The first place for a company to start is to collect information from their carriers. It is very important that the data must contain service numbers, service types, and physical service locations. If the carrier provides bills on paper the company can still request an inventory in an electronic format.
The next place to collect information is internally. A great deal of the information will be found in HR and Finance systems such as PeopleSoft, SAP, Oracle and other databases, and spreadsheets. Additional provisioning information may be found in IT systems.>
Extend the Value of the Exercise - Make it a Repeatable Process
It is important to move this exercise beyond a one-time "snapshot" to a constant and repeatable process. To do this a company will need to convert their paper data into an electronic format. Inventory data will need to be normalized into a single database. It is important to combine mobile and landline services and create templates for storing information. A company should clean the data as they go so that they have a clean, organized service inventory that ties into other important data sources.
Employ a TEM Solution to Help
A telecom expense management (TEM) solution can help with the gathering, storing, and normalizing of telecommunications data. In addition, it can help a company to:
- Automate validation and manage by exception
- Understand Usage Drivers
- Ensure Contract Compliance
- Retire Outdated Technology
- Enforce Corporate Policy
- Create an Ongoing Validation Process
What a Company Will Find
Companies should target their hunt for problems in the following order:
- Locations
- People
- Cost Codes
- Corporate Projects
Following are the types of problems that they will find.
Company Mishaps
A company will find problems such as:
- Services are for invalid cost/project codes
- Billing is active for invalid cost/project codes
Vendor Mishaps
Companies will also identify problems with their vendors, such as:
- Incomplete MACDs (moves, adds, changes and deletes)
- Complete MACDs that were never reflected on bills
Combination (Company/Vendor) Mishaps
The company will also uncover problems that can be laid at the feet of both the vendor and the company, such as:
- Billing is active for services at closed locations
- Billing and services are active for terminated employees
What Should be Done with the Findings?
A company should first identify if the problem is internal vs. external. If the problem is internal, the company should:
- Develop or change business processes to address the problems
- Implement or enforce corporate policies
If problems are external, the company should:
- Understand their rights as well as the statute of limitations (there is no point wasting time on issues that can no longer be addressed)
- Submit findings to their carrier or carriers with as much background detail as possible
- Track credits to validate timely resolutions
- Escalate problems where necessary
Whether the problem is internal or external, the company should record the steps that they take and the lessons learned.
Conclusion
By collecting the right information, putting in place repeatable processes, and supporting the effort with a telecommunications expense management solution, any company should be able to successfully cut telecommunications costs by simple identifying and rectifying errors. Rectifying internal problems will help to prevent costly problems from happening. Identifying external errors and obtaining credits from carriers will save additional expense dollars.
About the Author
Mark Evans is the Chief Executive Officer of Quickcomm Software, a position that he has held for the past 11 years. He has 30 years of experience managing and consulting to telecommunications companies and has held previous roles as the Managing Director of ICC Telecommunications and Telecommunications Director for NatWest AsiaPac Market.
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