Most enterprises have a complex web of assets and services across their technology environment. Finding cost-saving opportunities, optimizing processes, and reducing unnecessary inefficiencies can become challenging with no single way to manage them all. Enter technology expense management.
What is Technology Expense Management?
Technology expense management is the process of managing expenses relating to all your technology assets. It centralizes all your essential data, like technology inventory and billing, into a single user-friendly platform.
By doing this, you improve the visibility and accuracy of your technology inventory. This is similar to telecom expense management services. While telecom expense management consolidates your telecom assets and expenses, technology expense management looks at your broader services and assets beyond telecom to provide a more comprehensive view.
The Rise in Popularity of Technology Expense Management
From networking and storage to infrastructure and cloud services, the amount of new technology to manage is growing fast. Retaining complete visibility of your IT inventory becomes more challenging, and this problem intensifies when you incorporate current industry trends.
Today, software transforms every product and service and supercharges it with connections. As a result, businesses are moving away from buying assets and investing in a phenomenon known as everything-as-a-service (XaaS) or technology expense management.
Embracing this shift can help organizations be more agile and save costs on traditional on-premises assets. However, it also means they have much less visibility and control. This can increase the risk of spending overruns, reduce profitability, and significantly impact the income bottom line.
4 Benefits of Technology Expense Management
Technology expense management allows enterprises to cast a better eye across all their services.
It aims to identify all IT services, who is consuming them, and whether they're consuming them efficiently. Then, inefficiencies are located, managed, and rectified, enabling organizations to gain control over their IT services.
Technology expense management also helps businesses to drive down spend via:
- Recovering billing anomalies detected through invoice audits
- Cancelling unused services, highlighted by usage data
- Optimizing underused services, also highlighted by usage data
- The value of well-delivered technology expense management is clear. But not all solutions are born equal.
Technology Expense Management Isn't An Add-on Service
It might seem like the next logical step to get started with technology expense management, but caution is advised. Let’s explore why.
Providers must offer expertise, support, and products to deliver valuable expense management services, whether technology or telecom.
Telecom expense management vendors can lack the information, knowledge, and resources to provide effective insight. Relying on a telecom expense management provider to identify and eradicate inefficiencies across all your IT services isn’t the best method of action, especially when they're specialization is only telecoms. For many enterprises, it's important to ask the question: is your telecom expense management provider good enough?
Is Your Telecom Expense Management Capable?
Look for a telecom expense management partner with specialist skills and technical expertise to fully understand IT service rate structures, contracts, and invoices.
The right provider must oversee all your assets and services in a single platform. While many might be able to do this for telecom expenses, can they manage the wide range of technology services and assets you have?
Choose a provider with demonstrable experience in a wide range of processes, including telecom expense management, managed mobility services, and cloud management. Ask for evidence of technology expense management from their existing customer relationships, and set KPIs and SLAs to ensure you'll experience true value from their business.
You can learn more about what to expect from a telecom expense management provider and how to find the right one for your needs in our telecom expense management sourcing guide.
Topics: TEM
