The Importance of Telecom Management Systems

A telecom inventory management system provides insight into the accuracy of your billing and provides transparency for your contracts with vendors. Investing in telecom inventory management brings the following advantages:

• Save money. Automating telecom inventory management helps you understand your monthly bills and comes in handy when you need reports for negotiations with providers.

• Save time. Telecom bills can be dozens or hundreds of pages long. Setting up your bills to automatically feed into a telecom inventory management system gives you transparency when you need to investigate discrepancies.

• Handle growth. If you have an automated telecom management system, it becomes easier to scale for rapid growth.

• Plan ahead. A telecom inventory management system makes it much easier to budget and manage telecom expenses. It’s crucial for decision support at the C-level

Getting Started

It’s not easy to manage telecommunications. This spend category frequently includes antiquated equipment, acquisitions, changing technology and complex contracts. Visibility into each item is key to effectively managing your inventory and tracking the various elements. This is especially true if you plan to change providers and need transparency and reporting to obtain accurate pricing proposals from competitors.

To create more visibility into telecommunications spending, you need accurate telecom service, device and feature tracking. Look for a reliable vendor that can provide a deep dive into your telecom infrastructure. A robust telecom inventory management system can produce reports on everything from MPLS nodes to phone logs.

Give your telecommunications analysts the ability to triangulate data from multiple sources for more complete results on telecom inventory expense management (TEM) software.

Inventory Spend Visibility

You may be wondering what to include in your inventory management system. Reliable tools allow you to enter information on cost, usage, features, account codes, location, users, suppliers, and other critical reporting information.

You also gain a holistic look at services, contract terms, configurations, spend volume, services, applications and requirements. This is invaluable if you need to do a cost-benefit analysis on existing or proposed telecom provisioning.

It’s important to find a vendor that is willing to customize its inventory management offering to the specific needs of your company. Choose a provider with experience in your industry but exposure to other industries as well so you get a comprehensive proposal that can also help you streamline your inventory or provider matrix.

Gain value insight into key metrics such as:

• Service Leval Agreements (SLAs)

• Financial commitment

• Terms and conditions

• Discounts

• Pricing

How Can a Telecom Inventory Management System Help with Tracking?

Telecom inventory management helps you track phone, voice and wireless services better. You can even capture data services. On each phone bill, wireless bill and data bill, there’s a billing address. This location may vary from the service address for companies with centralized billing. After you enter all your service locations, your telecom industry management can be automated and reported on.

Where Can I Find the Telecom Bills My Company Pays Now?

Your accounts payable team can send you invoices for each telecom location. For centralized billing, this may be a corporate headquarters. Be sure to enter all service provider invoices, any accounts that are missing impact your telecom inventory accuracy.

Why Is It Important to Review Telecom Contracts?

Commercial legal contracts are reviewed by your legal department. To avoid telecom penalties, it’s important to understand your contracts. Identifying the contract details of your telecom inventory management, including the start and end dates, can help you build a more reliable inventory management process.

What about Wireless Inventory Management?

Cut back on the time and effort required to maintain a detailed wireless inventory.

This will typically involve the following tasks:

• Organize your wireless inventory data

• List all plans, devices, circuits, and lines

• Enter all telecom orders and change requests

• Include locations, GL Codes, and users

Valicom Provides Comprehensive Telecom Inventory Management

Valicom uses Clearview, a telecom expense management (TEM) software, to customize and streamline your inventory management. We can manage your telecom inventory via an on-demand service or as part of a comprehensive contract to update your telecom services.

Ready to dive into TEM?

Give us a call, we’re ready to assist you.

sales@valicomcorp.com

608.274.3515

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: BRITTANY PECKHAM

Brittany grew up in Oregon, Wisconsin and graduated from the University of Wisconsin Business School with a Bachelor’s degree in Management and Human Resources with an emphasis in entrepreneurship. Brittany has been working with Valicom for many years creating content for the TEM industry to deliver the many benefits users and organizations can experience in utilizing TEM services. With a passion for social media marketing, Brittany enjoys applying creativity throughout various areas of her life while expressing creativity in everything she does and loves being consumed in projects, from start to finish.