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Explore our TEM blogs for expert perspective, real examples, and clear guidance to manage telecom and technology expenses confidently, with fresh insights added routinely.
About three weeks ago, we released a white paper titled “Top 4 Tips to Manage Business Wireless Costs” and have seen strong demand for that new title. Telecom and IT managers, along with CFOs and other financial analysts, are really struggling with mobile expenses and trying to seek out best practices to keep a handle on costs.
Wireless expenses may be the stuff of telecom manager nightmares, but wireline costs remain an expensive skeleton in the closet. Valicomfinds that its clients are wasting between 10 and 30 percent of their annual wireline budgets. Unnecessary business lines, unused circuits and illegitimate third-party charges mean many firms are overpaying for services, often for many years.
As most telecom managers know, third party charges on invoices, known as “cramming”, have historically been a major problem. Now that problem is rapidly infecting wireless environments and the federal government is taking notice. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently announced it is pursuing its first wireless cramming case.
TechRepublic just posted an interesting article on BYOD (bring-your-own-device), and some worst case scenarios. Whether or not to implement BYOD is a decision each firm has to make for itself, and its own environment.
Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam recently stated that 50 percent of their wireless traffic is for video consumption. He expects this to grow to 66 percent by 2017.
It’s been an interesting week for announcements in the mobile universe. First T-Mobile announced it would drop two-year contracts and phone subsidies, shifting instead to a fee structure where customers pay a discounted upfront charge for new phones, followed by small monthly payments until the entire cost is paid off.
Valicom released a new white paper today titled “Top 4 Tips to Manage Business Wireless Costs”. Recommended for anyone responsible for corporate mobile and wireless management, and seeking best practices in wireless expense reduction and cost control, the paper can be accessed from the Valicom telecom expense management white paper library.
Last but not least, any telecom expense management software worth its weight in kilobytes should offer lots of reporting. As they say, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”. And the beauty of all your telecom and wireless data being integrated in one system is that it allows you to look at it from many different angles.
Are you swimming in invoices from increased cellular services? Has BYOD or other telecom services forced you to review your telecom contracts? Are you wondering how many devices you have in your company? If you answered “Yes” to any of these, then you should attend this month’s educational session.
At this point, all your invoice and inventory data is already in a telecom management software platform. If the system is designed to help you remember to check your next invoice to verify the change you recorded was actually implemented by your vendor. All this is handled via the software’s “Issues” area.
Telecom management software has to have a robust tracking mechanism for changes as buildings open and close, personnel get hired or fired, and devices get retired and replaced. Otherwise, any telecom inventory management program you may have in place will get derailed pretty fast. Telecom inventory is not something static, but rather a fluid environment that is ever changing as the image below well illustrates.
To further our discussion of document management beyond contracts, which our last post was on, one of the biggest pain points of telecom has got to be invoices. Little missiles of irritation that arrive in the mail to ruin your day. Sometimes by the boxful. And you know you should really look at all of those – line by line, every single month – to make sure they are accurate. But really, who has the time?
While we’re on the topic of making your life easier and saving you time, document management comes to mind. In the modern era, no one wants a file cabinet stuffed full of papers hulking in the corner of their office. And they certainly don’t want to have to dig through it to find contract information.
We are continuing our series discussing how telecom management software streamlines telecom management tasks. In our last post, we discussed Telecom Management Software Vs Inventory Management.
Will Kelly over at Tech Republic posted a good article called 10 Essential Elements of BYOD Training. The article covers training needed to introduce staff to a BYOD program. Takeaway: Training is a critical part of any BYOD initiative, introducing users to security and policy guidelines and allowing IT and management to set expectations.
We are continuing our series discussing how telecom management software streamlines telecom management tasks. In our series on how telecom expense management software can make your telecom management job easier, we’re starting with the Big Kahuna. Inventory. And it’s a doozy….
Telecom expense management, or TEM, consists of a variety of tasks, each one handling a different aspect of the telecom environment. So a TEM software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool is designed to make it easier to enter data, track changes, cross-reference items, flag problems and push invoices from entry, to approval, to payment.
To kick off our series on how telecom expense management software can make wrangling your telecom and wireless environment easier, we should start with terms. The best softwares out there today are web-based, or software-as-a-service (SaaS). We discussed this in a previous post about using stone age tools for stone age results.
As we discussed in our previous two posts about “Living in the Past” Part 1 and Part 2, you need modern tools to address modern needs. This applies to everything from using your smartphone to find the closest Starbucks (something I will admit to doing on a regular basis) to managing your firm’s telecom and wireless environment.
As we discussed in Part One of “Living in the Past”, businesses should strive to keep an eye out for new tools and technology that can make their jobs easier. And I don’t mean easier as in “I get to leave for the golf course half an hour early”, I mean easier like “We saved 30% of our telecom spend over last year, because now we can actually SEE what we’re doing”.
We all know that it’s a lot easier to use tried and true tactics, going down the same path every day, rather than tackling anything different. Heaven forbid – you might have to learn something new! But the price you pay for stagnation can be huge. New techniques arise, best practices evolve over time, fresh technology comes out…. Your competitors are probably on board. The 25-year old guy in the corner cube who wants your office is probably on board. You better get on board too, or the boat is going to leave without you.