Effective telecom expense management (TEM) ensures you get the most value out of the technology and services your enterprise relies on.
But for many organizations, managing telecoms is a burden. Crucial data is trapped with end-users, which makes it difficult to gain complete visibility over their telecoms estates.
Now, more than ever, you need to incorporate telecom expense management best practices into your strategy.
What is Telecom Expense Management?
Communication is the cornerstone of any successful organization – especially in the age of remote working. The number of devices in the average business has escalated over the past few years. And so have the costs.
When you have hundreds of devices, contracts, and users in your network, it can be difficult to monitor them all, let alone understand what you're paying for and why. This is why more and more organizations rely on professional telecom expense management services.
Telecom Expense Management Best Practices
Effective telecom expense management takes the stress out of managing a complex comms estate. Among a host of other benefits, it helps you:
- Audit your estate
- Make reporting more transparent
- Accurately track and manage telecom assets
- Streamline internal processes
- Optimize costs
As an expert TEM partner, we recommend these telecom expense management best practices to ensure you stay on top of your costs.
1. Inventory Management
Telecom expense management revolves around data. Understanding your inventory is key to understanding your bill. If your telecom expenditure is out of control, the first place to scrutinize is your assets.
Costs can easily slip under the radar in large organizations with equally large telecom inventories. Careful inventory management gives you a clearer idea of your ecosystem, so you can remove redundant devices and services to free up costs.
But inventory management isn’t just about stripping away certain endpoints. It’s also a chance to refresh your services with newer, more cost-effective solutions.
2. Invoice Management
If you’re not tracking your bills, catching inflated telecom spend is nearly impossible. A systematic approach to invoice management enables you to consolidate billing information from multiple sources. This reduces human error and the chances that you'll overlook or miss a critical bill.
Global organizations that continue to audit their telecom expenses by hand with paper invoices struggle the most. That's why automated, repeatable processes that improve the accuracy of your bill tracking are considered best practices.
The same is true for dealing with and managing your contracts with carriers. It’s easy to agree to a contract and then leave it. But many businesses pay more the longer they’re on a contract than they do at the start.
Don't hesitate to renegotiate your contracts or go elsewhere for a fresh rate. Part of managing your invoices and contracts is being proactive – it’s up to you, or a trusted TEM company, to take the fight to the carriers.
3. Expense Optimization
A fundamental principle of telecom expense management best practice is to make the most of what you already have. Forecast usage to predict telecom expenditure. This will make optimising your expenses and aligning spending with your business objectives easier.
To truly understand your expenses, you need to implement comprehensive cost and usage reporting that you can filter by:
- Service
- Location
- End-user
- Cost center
4. End-User Visibility
For a global organization, it can be easy to fall into the mistake of simply scrutinizing your telecom network from the top level.
If thousands of employees are spread across multiple countries, each with their own device, it might seem easier to view their expenses as a blanket cost. But you could miss vital data if you don't audit usage down to the individual.
This becomes particularly important if you’re running a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) program. Enterprise BYOD solutions allow employees to access your network through their personal devices.
Then there’s the question of monitoring inventory. Do you know what happens to those devices when employees leave the company?
5. Incident Management
No technology is perfect, and while rare, network outages happen. Some organizations log incidents and investigate the causes manually. This can be extremely difficult to do at scale, but it's crucial. Most network outages result in at least $100,000 in total losses to an organization.
You can't eliminate network downtime entirely, but you can invest in solutions that provide complete visibility over your telecoms network. This allows you to monitor your devices and services continuously, quickly responding to incidents and minimizing the impact on your business.
6. Engage an Experienced TEM Provider
As a global organization, gaining total control and visibility over your technology expenses is a huge undertaking.
With innumerable invoices and devices to manage, how do you ensure nothing slips through the cracks? And how do you know that your telecom carriers offer your business the fairest and most beneficial terms? According to telecom expense management best practices, the answer is to work with an experienced TEM provider.
Working with an experienced TEM partner alleviates that burden. It lets you focus on what you do best while someone else handles your company’s expenses.
An expert provider can offer a wide range of services, including:
- Invoice and inventory management
- Billing analysis
- Procurement support
- Provisioning support
- BYOD program
- Telecom expense audits
TEM companies understand your telecoms environment and specialize in giving you visibility over your infrastructure, whether wireline, employee-owned or fully mobile.
Powerful auditing software allows TEM providers to compare invoices against usage and identify areas of overspending right down to the individual end-user. Crucially, a global TEM partner can manage this data across numerous countries and in multiple languages, creating a unified system across your organization.
In addition, TEM providers work closely with carriers to negotiate the best deal for your business. They help you see through the technical jargon and ensure the contracts you sign work for you – before you agree to a multi-year commitment.
Working with Cass
An experienced TEM partner offers all these services as a minimum. But at Cass, we know what good TEM looks like.
Our fully-managed services include everything from audits and reporting to invoice management, bill pay, UEM solutions, to mobile lifecycle management. And when you work with Cass, you gain access to a team of telecom experts that feels like part of your organization.
Topics: TEM
