* Tracking your cell phone assets
Do you want to be a hero to your CFO? Tell him that you have an easy way to save your enterprise tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. All it takes is imposing a little bit of discipline on your mobile communication services.
Chances are high that many of the employees in your organization carry company-sponsored devices such as cellular phones, pagers, PDAs, and Blackberries. These types of devices represent the fastest growing telecommunications expense, and for the most part, they go unmanaged.
For companies with a thousand or more devices, the costs can be a real blind spot for the CFO. Often, departments or individual employees choose for themselves which service carrier to use, resulting in multiple service providers and a lost opportunity for volume discounts. Worse, monthly bills can get buried in personal expense reports, and the finance department never gets a clear picture of what is being spent on service, or how efficiently the contracted services are being used.
This is the problem that Traq-wireless, of Austin, aims to attack with its mobile communications management software. Traq’s mantra is organize, analyze and then optimize. Traq’s Web-based management software takes mobile service billing data from all the leading cellular, paging, calling card and packet data service providers. It doesn’t matter that you have multiple providers servicing your company; if the billing data is in an electronic format, it can feed into a single corporate database for analysis.
Once the data is consolidated, you can view wireless usage and costs by department, individual, or even service type (i.e., cellular, paging, etc.). Color-coded views let you spot trends or trouble spots. For example, you can see if a specific employee routinely exceeds his monthly allotment of plan minutes and incurs higher overage charges. You can see if traveling businessmen regularly rack up roaming charges.
But Traq goes beyond telling you what’s happening; it helps you optimize the services you pay for. For instance, the software analyzes an individual cellular user’s calling profile and suggests a calling plan that best fits his unique needs. In the examples above, the employee who exceeds his minutes every month might need a plan with more minutes. Or, it might be that this employee is using his company-sponsored phone for excessive personal calls – an issue that’s better addressed through policy than through a heftier plan.
If you do use multiple providers for the same type of service, Traq lets you compare the usage and fees of each provider side by side. So it’s finally possible to know which providers offer the most cost-effective services. Better yet, you can see where you could be consolidating lots of individual service contracts into one larger one in order to receive a volume discount.
An asset-tracking module allows you to keep track of every cell phone, every Blackberry unit, and every battery-charger issued to employees. Many companies have reduced costs by centralizing the issuance of all such devices and knowing who has them at all times.
Several companies using Traq-wireless’ software have realized very significant savings:
* The Kleinfelder Group used Traq software to analyze the usage and spending habits of more than 2,000 employees. Through optimization, the company cut its average per-minute cell phone charges from 28 cents down to 13 cents.
* Gentronics drove down airtime costs for its 3,000 employees, yielding an annual savings of $300,000.
* Flowserve, of Texas, reduced its per-minute charges and shaved $260,000 off its million-dollar-plus cellular bill in 2002.
Companies that have used the software to sniff out and reduce waste have a few suggestions for best practices:
* Do not allow individuals to contract for wireless services. You get the best volume discounts if the negotiating power is held by a central office.
* If Traq suggests different rate plans for employees and you approve them, follow-up to make sure the changes went into effect.
* Use the asset-tracking feature to keep track of what you’ve bought. When an employee leaves the company, HR can use the tracker to see if the person has equipment to turn in or services to turn off.
* When an employee requests a device or service, ask him to fill out a profile questionnaire so you can best match his needs for a service plan and product. This can keep you from over or under buying a suitable solution.
Large companies easily spend millions of dollars per year on mobile services. Traq-wireless can help you spot and act on trends and habits and yield cost reductions of 10% to 40%. If you tell your CFO about these numbers, I bet he’ll buy you lunch.
Linda Musthaler is vice president of Currid & Company. You can write to her at mailto:Linda.Musthaler@currid.com
