Telecom expense management processes pay off big

By Kevin Dunetz, Network World
September 03, 2008 12:19 PM ET

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter's approach.

Companies have been tightening their telecom belts for years, and as we revisit our budgets it's hard to believe there could be any savings left to squeeze out. But with a combination of technology and strategic processes you'd be surprised how much telecom waste you can still eliminate.

Telecom expense management (TEM) software and managed services coupled with procurement/ordering adjustments can save you millions of dollars on wireline and wireless investments without impacting user productivity. By consolidating telecom management, validating your telecom investment and usage, renegotiating your contracts and optimizing your voice and data infrastructure, you can achieve a highly efficient and cost-effective telecom structure.

Here are some tips for how to get the most from your telecom budget:

* Consolidate. Before you can start to save money, you have to know what cell phone, circuit and service assets you have strewn about the enterprise. The first step is to create a single inventory of telecom assets by gathering data from internal inventory spreadsheets, databases, carrier CSRs, contracts and invoices. This centralized pool gives you instant visibility into and control over wireline and wireless investments.

Related Content

Another big benefit of consolidation is the savings you'll see on invoice processing. Typical multimillion-dollar companies can spend upwards of $40 to receive, review and process a single telecom carrier invoice. By getting these invoices out of the hands of individual office managers and into a centralized database, you can start to gain economies of scale. For example, you can send a single check to a vendor providing multiple services. You can also automate parts of the invoice-review process, such as automatically approving invoices that fall within acceptable parameters. By cutting your check writing from thousands to hundreds, you'll see tremendous savings in a very short time.

* Validate. Once you've consolidated your telecom assets, it will be easier to see where your telecom dollars are being spent and validate that this is the appropriate use of your budget. One key to validation is to map the centralized asset inventory you've created to other sources of data such as carrier invoices, company real estate directories, telecom contracts, tariffs, CSRs and employee directories. Another key to validation is to map the usage of assets for things like long distance and wireless usage against key performance indicators (that is, what people or offices typically use) and corporate usage policies.

By mapping your inventory, you'll also be able to uncover services, hardware and circuits that aren't being used. For instance, one company found it was still paying for circuits at an office that had closed because the service had never been terminated with the phone company. Another determined it had been paying for phone lines from a company with a similar name due to a data-entry error by the service provider.

Through validation of usage, another company found the highest portion of its monthly wireless bill -- $5,000 -- could be tracked back to employees calling overseas at a high cost per minute. With the insight TEM afforded, the company was able to stop the calls and return this money to the budget.