According to a recent Transparency Market Research report, telecom expense management (TEM) will be worth a staggering $4.92 billion in the US by 2024. Yet TEM still remains underutilised in Europe.
Gartner defines telecom expense management (TEM) as a service that enables IT, procurement, and finance departments to improve their processes. This includes the lifecycle of ordering, provisioning, support, and cost management within a large-scale enterprise.
With TEM, enterprises can improve visibility across communications, associated IT services and their inventories. A TEM provider can help identify cost-savings and optimisation opportunities, manage a growing number of end-points and devices, and support global teams with local resources and expertise.
By failing to capitalize on TEM, European enterprises are missing out on a wide range of benefits.
Let's look at five of the most important benefits TEM can offer.
1. Reduced Telecom Costs
TEM services help organizations cut costs and streamline telecom expenses. In Europe, annual IT and telecom spend is expected to reach $994 billion by 2023. A TEM provider can help optimize this spend, helping to highlight inefficiencies, consolidate processes, and uncover savings opportunities.
It's estimated that 12-20% of telecoms charges are incorrect. This can occur for many different reasons like incorrect vendor billing, lack of resource or internal time to check invoices against contracts and a general lack of visibility or detail around what your company is paying for. This can equate to tens or even hundreds of thousands of wasted expenditure on a regular basis.
To mitigate this, TEM providers deliver a top-down view of an organisation's telecom spend. This includes storing invoices, contracts, financial reports, and other relevant documentation within a single, centralised database that helps with decision-making. And by leveraging a TEM expertise and industry knowledge, they’re able to offer actionable insights into the current telecom climate, helping business leaders make better informed decisions which, in turn, enables them to gain maximum value from their budget.
2. Scalability & Flexibility
Anyone who relies on communication as part of their day-to-day operations can reap the rewards of a fully managed TEM service. Over the past year, we've seen a significant increase in remote working, and as a result, endpoint management has become ever-more challenging.
End-users need instant collaboration and fast access to secure remote working tools. And this needs to be seamless and flexible, adapting to scale with new users, devices, and connections, especially as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and Bring Your Own Network (BYON) initiatives are growing in popularity.
To handle a growing telecom environment, TEM providers can support enterprises with services such as unified endpoint management (UEM). UEM makes it easy to maintain network security across a dispersed workforce, deliver updates to personal devices, and centralize data management, all supported on a global scale.
For employees, this gives them the flexibility to work on a device of their choice, while ensuring they stay protected. This greatly improves their experience while simultaneously giving organizations more control over their device infrastructure.
3. In-region Resources & Expertise
Global enterprises often have operations spanning multiple countries. This creates problems when it comes to vital in-region knowledge, which is often a prerequisite for managing vendor relationships, contract negotiation, and mobility lifecycle management.
Internal teams may lack the experience in the unique differences of each country within your telecom estate, which can create inefficiencies in your telecom management, especially if that stretches over several countries within Europe, for example.
A global TEM provider can overcome this by utilising in-region resources. They have local teams with the knowledge and experience to secure the best rates, manage the mobility lifecycle, and dispute costs. Additionally, in-depth expertise on local languages, currencies, and market conditions will ensure that enterprises get the best service, regardless of the country they're operating in.
Case Study: EU Oil & Gas Enterprise
A European Oil and Gas enterprise chose to work with Cass to manage their procurement processes.
Our expert team assessed over 40 RFP responses from suppliers and provided end-to-end procurement support. With in-region resources and expertise in each of the 15 countries, we could deliver the industry experience and visibility needed to negotiate the best outcome.
Cass was able to deliver cost savings of 36%, equalling an overall saving of over $6 million. With better visibility into telecom spend, Cass was able to improve cost controls and reporting capabilities to supplement future growth for the enterprise.
You can learn more about this case study here.
4. Telecom Visibility
Digital communications play a crucial role in the modern workplace, and most businesses will have to deal with a vast collection of invoices, reports, and other documentation every single day. The problem is, these will often originate from various sources, each with its own unique format. Making it tricky to keep track of exactly what’s being spent and where.
This is where TEM providers come into their own. Processing, converting, and storing all relevant information in a single database, they’re able to give decision-makers a wide-angle view of their telecom infrastructure using telecom inventory management.
At the local level, this enables in-country teams to work faster, without compromising on quality, and manage their specific spend and network environment more effectively. Likewise, at the European or regional level, global leadership benefits from being able to see the roll-up of spend, carrier relationships, and network topologies at a glance. This allows them to make broader regional decisions with greater speed and accuracy.
5. Adaptable TEM Support
Perhaps the chief benefit of hiring a TEM provider is the ongoing support they provide.
Organisations aren’t static entities; they evolve constantly. As such, it’s important not only to develop a comprehensive overview of an organisation’s telecom estate in the first instance, but throughout its entire lifecycle. In the long-term, this will ensure they can retain operational efficiency while also remaining compliant and fully cognisant of their telecom spend as and when they need to review it.
Additionally, regular monitoring will also better enable them to react to emerging trends within their industry that might have a knock-on effect on their telecommunications spend and make any necessary course corrections.
With the global landscape undergoing major shifts, having the support of a TEM provider to react effectively to market changes is essential for continued success.
Reduce Your TEM Spend with Cass Telecom
As the only TEM provider with service delivery teams across Europe, APAC, and North & South America, Cass offers a one-of-a-kind, fully-managed TEM solution that can help businesses of all shapes and sizes streamline their telecommunications infrastructure.
To find out more, and discover exactly how much you could save with TEM, click here.
Topics: TEM
