As business becomes ever more dependent on mobile communications, the cost of keeping employees untethered is soaring. In-Stat MDR estimates that companies will spend $12 billion on wireless services this year. If these expenses aren't being managed well, corporations are probably overpaying.

"Wireless provides lots of efficiencies and improves productivity for mobile users, but companies need to take control of the costs," says Philip Redman, research vice president for Gartner. Companies should implement a policy for wireless adoption, usage and management, and negotiate a corporate-wide service contract, he says.

"Enterprises with consistent and documented policies, coordinated service adoption and stringent management of wireless services will save 15% to 35%," Redman says. Sure, this takes time, but the payoff is money in the bank.

There are several things to consider when developing a policy, including which employees get company-paid service, personal vs. business usage, how wireless service should be expensed, and what security procedures wireless users - especially wireless data users - should practice. Seek input from all departments to draft an effective policy that lets users be most productive while keeping costs in check.

As a first step in tackling wireless-service cost management, conduct a wireless telecom audit of all your users. "You can't manage what you can't measure," says Lisa Pierce, a Giga Information Group analyst. Get a handle on wireless usage and service needs before drawing up contracts or policies, she advises.

One company that is trying to get as much as it can out of its wireless service is Hawaii Home Loans, which is using Sprint PCS wireless service to support all employees' voice and some of its wireless data needs. While the organization doesn't have a formal policy that restricts personal calls, "there is a direct correlation between usage and productivity," says Leonard Loventhal, senior vice president at Hawaii Home Loans in Honolulu. "On average our top producers are always talking to clients and therefore use the most minutes."

If an employee has logged a lot of minutes in a given month but hasn't brought in much business, then it's clear most of those minutes were for personal calls, he says.

Hawaii Home Loans uses Sprint PCS's Web site to track individual and group usage throughout the month. In the 14 months since the company began using Sprint PCS's service in and out of the office, Loventhal says there was only one instance when he had to tell an employee to curtail personal phone usage. "We brought her in and talked with her, and the problem was solved," Loventhal says. He could approach the employee because he had evidence: The Sprint PCS customer-service Web site shows detailed individual usage for outgoing and incoming calls, as well as the duration of each call.

The management tool lets Hawaii Home Loans monitor its bucket of minutes to ensure it doesn't exceed its allotted reserve. Loventhal negotiated a flexible corporate-wide contract and can easily reduce or increase the company's total minutes.

"That has been extremely easy for us to manage," he says, which also keeps costs in check.