Telecom expense management (TEM) is the process of consolidating,
Maximize Resource Availability
Unused or under-utilized telecom infrastructure can be a real pain-point for the modern-day business. It’s no secret that at an enterprise level, the telecom environment can be incredibly complex, and this intricacy can lead to challenges when tracking provisioning activities.
Often referred to as move, add, change, or disconnects (MACDs), these activities optimize the inventory environment, ensuring necessary resources are active while disconnecting those not in use. But far too often, mistakes in this optimization process occur.
When opening and closing branches at speed, enterprises can struggle to keep track of telecom services. This leads to errors – allowing overcharges to go undetected – and, while usually small, these costs can quickly add up.
With a TEM service, all MACDs are tracked as part of a more extensive expense management provision. Whenever a MACD occurs, it’s immediately reflected within the telecom inventory – this ensures complete visibility over the telecom environment and helps maximize the availability of telecom resources.
In addition, with a permanently updated telecom environment, the risk of late payment fees is extinguished, and the threat of shut-offs caused by non-payments eradicated. This is not only an example of another cost-saving function, but it also mitigates any threat of disruption, ensuring that productivity is not hampered as a result.
Streamline Business Processes
On the topic of productivity – an enterprise is only as profitable as it is productive. Productivity growth is essential to modern-day companies, since providing a greater number of goods and services to consumers, without increasing costs, translates into an improved bottom-line.
As discussed, tracking expense management activity is fraught with challenges. Not only is the vastness and perplexing nature of the telecom environment tough to navigate – with various, disparate services arranged via complicated rate-structures with multi-year commitments – but many organizations still turn to programs such as Excel when performing critical financial functions.
Spreadsheets were created to help enterprises better interpret and quantify large data sets and discern key performance indicators (KPIs). But manually calculating the discrepancies between invoices and asset records is a long and drawn out procedure where the potential for human error is rife and can quickly become a time-sink task.
To eliminate the need for such a marathon exercise, powerful purpose-built TEM software automates many of these processes so enterprise teams can focus on other core responsibilities, such as strategic projects. And with a TEM service working as an extension of their finance teams, enterprises can maximize the value of the TEM software to accomplish even more with fewer resources.
Identify and Eradicate Discrepancies
Sometimes, even when enterprise organizations take all the necessary steps to maximize their resource utilization, they still end up overpaying for telecom services thanks to overcharges from service providers.
It’s estimated the average enterprise spends roughly 4% of its revenue on telecommunications with 10% of that spending associated with billing errors. For a multi-national company, this translates to millions of dollars a year spent on absolutely nothing.
Utilizing TEM software to automate the identification of discrepancies between the infrastructure environment and service provider invoices is only the first step. Once this disparity is noted, the next task is to recover the lost spend and prevent these overcharges from continuing.
A TEM service provides a method of accomplishing this goal. While software can catch billing rate errors and other types of nefarious charges, to reach truly optimized spend levels, experienced telecom auditors are required to evaluate all of the details of each circuit or service and identify methods to reduce costs.
The Value of TEM
Truly great TEM provides organizations with the opportunity to get a handle on their telecom
While companies of all sizes can benefit from streamlined processes, cost-savings and relief from time-sink tasks, Gartner reports that multinational corporations (MNCs) with more than $3 billion in revenue and complex telecom expense management (TEM) environments stand the most to gain.
Topics: TEM
