Welcome back to the Monday Morning Catch Up! We hope your morning is off to a great start. In this week’s edition, find out what tools and services organizations are using to manage their telecom expenses more efficiently.
Need some fuel to get going on Monday mornings? Take a pit stop at our new weekly blog, “The Monday Morning Catch Up.” Find out the latest tips and tricks for managing your telecom expenses more effectively. Check in each week for intriguing visuals, videos and SlideShare presentations. What’s better than starting your week with the latest TEM resources?
Last post we talked about wireline, and this time we will discuss wireless invoice auditing. There is a difference in what you need to look for, so we separated them to make it easier to know where to focus.
This is where the rubber meets the road. Old school landline telecom invoice auditing. Every piece of paper that comes into your office from a carrier is a place to save money. Incorrect charges, setup fees you were never supposed to pay, items not billing to contract terms – there are a lot of reasons you are paying too much for your telecom services.
SlideShare number two is now on Valicom’s SlideShare Channel! This latest SlideShare provides information about current trends that will affect businesses now and in the long run. Don’t fall behind just because you’re not informed. Inform yourself now, by viewing this intriguing slide deck:
Telecom invoice auditing has always been the cornerstone of a strong TEM program. It is the first thing that comes to mind to control telecom and mobile costs, though it is far from universally implemented. Many firms simply receive invoices, verify they are within a tolerable range of variance, and pay them. This is an expensive oversight – analyst research confirms that up to 15% of telecom invoices have errors. Not having a dedicated person or team to review invoices monthly for problems can create a big leak in the telecom budget. A leak you can plug.
Valicom has posted their first SlideShare! The below SlideShare talks about the increasing trend of BYOD. Is it cost effective? Is it security safe? Are there legal and non-compliance issues? These are all important things to think about when implementing BYOD as part of your business. While this SlideShare points out problems created by BYOD, it also discusses alternative solutions that would steer you in direction that best fits your business needs.
Often in organizations, telecommunications expenses are allocated at too high of a level, without regard for the type of usage or the purpose of the service. This kind of high level accounting can short-circuit existing internal incentives that are designed to reduce expenses.
At first TEM programs only focused on telecommunications lines and the bills from carriers. As the telecommunications world has expanded so has the discipline. A number of other practices now fall under the umbrella of TEM.
With the expanding complexity of telecom, there is an ever growing push to integrate cost allocation into expense management. Managers want to know who pays for telecom services, and how much they pay, so they can make intelligent decisions using that data. IT and finance both want deeper visibility into what is driving costs, and hopefully, insight as to how the environment can be restructured to minimize the impact to the bottom line.
Huge not only in dollar value, but in sheer volume. Some firms have complex telecom environments including many locations, multiple vendors, and various services ranging from mobile to WAN. This can mean a lot of paper coming in, a responsibility that may make you want to hide in your office and pretend like you’re on vacation. For a year.
A popular service TEM firms offer is telecom invoice processing, but many clients don’t quite understand WHAT it is or HOW it works. What they do understand is that phone bills are a pain in the neck.
Invoice detail is most often associated with cost allocation and a telecom auditing. User, usage and cost information is made more visible, so errors and overcharges can more easily be seen and corrected. Data can be entered and allocated to a degree of detail dictated by the individual client, as some may want more granular information available for reporting. Electronic invoice copies are also stored in their original layout, as a PDF or other desired format, for archiving and research needs. This creates a rich history of data for use over time, giving visibility to important trends and the distribution of costs throughout the firm.
As much as companies rely on communications to connect with customers, partners and colleagues throughout the world, each channel can add significant costs to the overall telecom budget. This drives a need for telecom expense management to ensure all channels are necessary and optimized for the lowest cost.
As mentioned in our previous post on wireless, inventory management is critical to keeping a lid on your telecom costs. The trick is knowing WHAT to manage. And until the landline telephone goes away, they are still a headache. Here are some best practices we’ve found from twenty years of fixed wireline expense management….
Our telecom auditing teams manage mobileenvironments of various sizes, and we hit up our operations experts for some best practices. First we’ll go over ideas for wireless and mobile inventory management (cell phones, smartphones, tablets), then we’ll get into wireline (landline telephones).
Telecom expense management (TEM), as an industry, was born as a business process outsourcing (BPO) solution. However, with the recent creation of low cost, easy to deploy TEM software tools, many firms have chosen to bring their TEM program in house. But the expansion of devices, complexity and risk in modern telecom environments have led many managers to rethink that decision and move back to an outsourced model.
23-year veteran of telecom expense management (TEM) Valicom announces the launch of their educational series. Released on their blog and as downloads on their website, the article series hopes to shed light on the various elements within a strong TEM program.
The old adage “You can’t manage what you can’t measure” starts with inventory. Tracking phones, devices, circuits and assets is the starting point for gaining control over expenses. There is no way to know what the telecom costs should be if the data isn’t there on what the costs cover. And as the telecom environment expands with mobile devices and smartphones, or companies grow through mergers and acquisitions, keeping track gets even more complicated.
Wireless Expense Management (WEM) is a subsection of Telecom Expense Management (TEM) with a focus on wireless services and mobile devices. The goals for WEM programs are similar to TEM programs. They seek to proactively reduce expenses, establish new operational efficiencies, increase visibility and provide better control for mobile voice and data services.
The Android Police did a good job recently laying bare the latest scandal of fraudulent apps and malware infecting the Droid universe.Though it was caught fairly quickly, the recent fake Virus Shield app rocketed to #1 on the App Store with over 10,000 downloads in a week – at $3.99 each – before it was determined that it offered no security features whatsoever.