Budget management, running costs, and other mundane expenses can put additional strain on busy IT finance departments. So, how do you make impactful changes to improve your IT expense management?
Thought leaders predict that worldwide IT spending will grow by 8%, and 80% of CIOs plan to increase their spending on cyber and information security in the next year.
New software, solutions, and services have the potential to drive innovation, growth, and greater efficiency in your enterprise. However, releasing the funds for them can be a challenge.
Why Telecom Expense Management Benefits Your IT Finances
An effective telecom expense management (TEM) partner will deliver considerable cost reductions and eradicate many of your IT finance department's most common pain points.
Partners achieve this by increasing visibility across your telecom environment, improving end-user experience, and identifying cost-saving possibilities to redirect finances into new opportunities.
Let's explore how.
4 Ways to Improve IT Expense Management
3. Look for Continuous Cost Saving Opportunities
4. Automate IT Expense Management
1. Increase Visibility
Optimizing IT budgets can be a major obstacle for organizations due to a lack of tools, processes, or internal expertise. So, where do you start?
The first step to improving your IT expense management is increasing visibility across your telecom estate. Ideally, IT departments should have processes in place to:
- Allocate charges for all telecom expenses
- Create detailed, accurate reports
- Provide insight to cost-center managers so they know what they're buying
A telecom expense management partner works closely with you to understand your visibility challenges. Whether it's an insight into where your IT spending is going or opportunities to reduce spending, they can help you capture an accurate understanding of individual departmental spending. This gives you concrete evidence to justify your costs.
Additionally, correct telecom spend allocation means you avoid unnecessary challenges – like an unexpected charge resulting from faulty reporting.
2. Manage End-user Behavior
Uncontrolled costs can quickly occur in global enterprises. End-users can easily deploy unverified software and other tools to improve efficiency. This is called shadow IT, where new solutions are deployed without the explicit approval of IT and finance departments.
You don't want to stifle innovation in your business. However, for effective IT expense management, you need to know:
- The frequency of new costs
- Exactly where new costs occur
Managing corporate mobility at an enterprise level is complex, and today's bring your own device (BYOD) culture adds to your sprawling network of devices and costs.
A telecom expense management partner can help you understand where spend is going and provide an in-depth view of who uses what. Additionally, your provider's team can help you implement policies that encourage compliance and compliant end-user behavior.
3. Look for Continuous Savings Opportunities
IT expense management isn't just about immediate cost-cutting opportunities. You can achieve meaningful, long-term savings by improving processes across your entire management lifecycle. We recommend you look at your processes for:
- Auditing
- Sourcing
- Reporting
- Bill dispute and payment
Processes like a telecom expense audit help you immediately establish long-term visibility of your telecom environment, helping you understand where to reduce IT expenses. Meanwhile, improved sourcing and contract negotiation helps you get greater value from your carriers and suppliers.
These are just a few examples of continuous saving opportunities across an enterprise, and telecom expense management partner can help. They look at spending across the entire telecoms lifecycle to optimize spending, year after year.
$6 Million in Savings for Oil and Gas Giant
We helped a leading oil and gas organization renegotiate and consolidate five major telecom contracts, avoiding an imminent $2 million price hike. As a result, they achieved overall savings equal to $6 million.
4. Automate IT Expense Management
Investing in automation and robotic process automation (RPA) is fundamental in today's ever-changing technology landscape. In fact, it's one of the key telecom expense management trends in the coming year.
A telecom expense management partner can help by delivering faster response times and more granular data using RPA. For example, they can:
- Extract detailed data for more effective decision-making
- Collect and assign telecom charges at a granular level
- Integrate with your general ledger to ensure appropriate entries
- Automate reporting for key stakeholders, like cost-center managers
A trusted telecom expense management partner can help you find automation opportunities that work well with your processes. This can improve time management for your internal teams. For example, automated reporting helps managers understand their budgets and reduces the number of inquiries they receive.
Unlock New IT Expense Management Opportunities
Cost reduction empowers you and your teams to reallocate spending to other places and projects, and your chosen telecom expense management partner is pivotal in spotting those opportunities.
With more than a century of steady growth, Cass is a unique and reliable partner for telecom expense management services. We understand your pain points and provide years of reputable stability helping businesses just like yours. Get in touch today.
Topics: TEM
