Valicom, a Madison, WI-based provider of telecom expense management (TEM) solutions, announced it is offering a free webinar to show how best practices paired with cutting edge Web-based telecom expense management software tools help control telecom expenses.
Everywhere I turn its Cloud this and Cloud that. It’s starting sound like bad band names from the 70s, or children’s books. “Steve Jobs and The Cloud” “Amazon and The Cloud” “Microsoft and The Cloud”. If I hear “To the Cloud!” one more time, I may have to plug my ears with wax. I suggest they make a Japanese horror movie and see if we can eradicate this rapidly-becoming-annoying menace – “Godzilla Vs The Cloud”. Personally, I think Godzilla would win. Especially with all that extra nuclear radiation floating around right now.
One of the great things about working at Valicom is the ability to attend fantastic supplier diversity conferences throughout the year, like the WBENC Annual Conference in Las Vegas in June. Woman-owned, veteran-owned and minority-owned businesses are significant drivers of the national economy and these high-energy networking events are an inspiring way to connect with and help grow that community.
When the check arrives late because the mail was slow, you get hit with late fees. And what can be worse, if the check is misapplied to a different telecom account, you are stuck spending sometimes hours on the phone getting the issue resolved. And in the process, your service may even be disconnected.
We’re happy to finally be rolling out our anticipated summer 2011 webinar on telecom cost control tactics. And by tactics we mean what? Well, telecom expense management has a lot of facets. Firms are interested in how to control expenses for landline telephones, wireless devices, cell phones, smartphones, tablets, data services – the list is endless. We will go over the things you should be focusing on – where the best areas for savings are – and best practices in managing your telecom environment.
Like any relationship worth having, is the relationship you have with your Telecom Expense Management (TEM) provider serving your company the way you expected, or producing the results you were told? If not, the time is NOW to take a look into your options.
Valicom, a twenty year veteran of telecom expense management, is offering a free webinar to show how best practices paired with cutting edge web-based software tools help control telecom expenses.
Well, it didn’t take long for the Google Mobile Wallet to cause a firestorm….PayPal has sued Google and two of its top execs, both former PayPal employees, for stealing trade secrets that helped the search company break into the multi-billion dollar mobile payments industry.
In another good example of increasing telecom complexity, your smartphone is now your credit card. Google is leading the pack in processing mobile payments, by unveiling the Google Wallet NFC (Near Field Communications) payments program in New York City on Thursday. In a nutshell, it means that the time has come where you can search for, swipe and buy items from your phone, without ever taking your credit card out of your pocket.
I had the excellent opportunity last week to mingle and meet with a number of our nation’s largest energy utilities at their annual EEI conference in Seattle. In addition to drinking great Washington wines, and enjoying the seasonal Copper River salmon that had just come in, I learned a great deal about the challenges of taking our energy system into the future. Implementation of “smart grid” technology, the pressures to upgrade and expand energy delivery infrastructure, and the looming issue involved with a nation full of “plugged-in” electric cars mean that the industry is facing a variety of expenses and pressures.
As if technology hadn’t been moving fast enough, a group at Queen’s University in Canada has created the first smartphone you can bend.The so-called PaperPhone is a only a prototype right now, but its creator, Roel Vertegaal, believes the device, and flexible display technologies in general, will become commonplace in the future.
As telecom grows in complexity, managing wireless and telecom costs becomes ever more difficult, while still being a critical way to control business expenses. New web-based software tools have entered the market that make managing telecom expenses easier, faster and more cost-effective.
Last but not least in our posts on telecom expense management tasks made easier with TEM software., we’re going to cover reporting. Granted, this is not an exhaustive list of tasks, by any means, but it’s a good start. You can go back and see what we had to say about inventorymanagement, cost allocation, telecom contracts, telecom invoice management, order & change management and issue tracking. And now for your reading pleasure….
After discussing how telecom expense management software can assist with order & change management, we need to talk about issue tracking. Granted, we’re sure YOU never have problems with your telecom vendors/inventory/lines/devices/users/credits etc, but you know, some people do. And it’s a pain to manage.
If you’re not sick of it yet, we continue in our overview of telecom expense management tasks that can be streamlined with a good TEM software, we’ve covered inventorymanagement, cost allocation, telecom contracts and telecom invoice management. Another challenging thing to keep track of is….
Speaking of document management, 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 knowyou 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?
As we’ve been discussing ways to make your life easier and save 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. A contract should be electronic, easy to find, and cross-referenced with the items it pertains to.
Another telecom management task that will conjure up memories of your Mother, or maybe your Father, is the age old question – “Who is going to pay for this thing?” Now that you know what you have, your CFO probably wants to know who is responsible for each particular business expense. Those Accountants, always so picky. But that is what you pay bean counters to do – count beans. And sometimes they even want the beans split into pieces! It is not uncommon to have one inventory item being paid for by multiple departments.
Sometimes it doesn’t hurt to remind ourselves that thefancy technology we are surrounded by doesn’t just dissipate at the end of its lifecycle. It has to go *somewhere* and it is greatly preferable that the somewhere be a recycling center than a landfill. So with Earth Day coming up this weekend, the continued success of Wisconsin’s e-cycling law is a welcome bit of news. If your state doesn’t offer convenient e-cycling, a quick Google search will turn up a number of organizations that can help you setup a good cell phone recycling program.
Now that we’ve discussed what TEM is and why you need it, and gone over the power of a SaaS telecom expense management application, we’ll walk through the tasks you can manage to help control your telecom costs. And we’ll start with:Telecom Inventory Management
Madison, WI (April 19, 2011) – Certified woman-owned telecom expense management software and telecom auditing firm Valicom is proud to be honored as part of DiversityBusiness.com’s 11th Annual Business Awards. Each year DiversityBusiness.com collects and compiles their ‘Top Business List’ on a State and National basis. The data is used to determine the most successful woman and minority owned entrepreneurs across the United States for their awards program.