Jeff Poirior

Aligning IT investments with the overall strategy of your operations will emerge as a number one priority for many organizations . Many companies are cutting costs in other areas to enhance their IT infrastructure. Telecom invoices may offer fertile ground for automation and improvement. This can lead to reduced costs in your payment and auditing efforts. Most telecom and network expenses take up to 5% of your enterprise's revenue. Implementing best practices can help you keep this expense at the lower end so that you can reallocate money to innovation projects.

COST VERIFICATION

When you take a look at your telecom expense, identify and document all the costs for your organization. This makes it easy to determine where you should concentrate your efforts. Loading these data points into a centralized system makes it easy to set benchmarks and optimization goals. Later, you can add dispute management for overcharges with various carriers. An effective telecom management system enables you to download information from various carriers, which provide billing data in different formats, onto a single platform. Although there is an administrative burden at the beginning of the process, this step allows you to compare and contrast billing from different vendors. Ultimately, a TEM system allows you to identify opportunities for savings.

A TEM system provides a platform to document this information in a uniform manner to make it easy to work with different datasets.

COST REVISION

Is it time to right-size your telecom carrier plans? By decommissioning ghost devices, dropping services your employees don't use, and following up on billing errors, you can often reduce your monthly and annual costs significantly. You need a clear view of the cost in order to identify revisions that can impact your bottom line. In a rapidly changing environment, this can be difficult to do without automated expense management tools. It's a constant challenge to review and tailor services that meet the needs of your organization without paying for oversized packages from inflexible vendors. An organized, well-maintained TEM system can make dispute management and cost recovery much less odious.

When you have incorrect charges on your billing statement or third-party charges have been assigned to you due to an error on the part of the carrier, it's important to explain your claim in the simplest terms. Having a TEM system allows you to pull data and deliver it to the carrier quickly for review. If your billing includes services that have not yet been implemented, loading your contract information into a TEM system can trigger billing discrepancies. A timely review of your monthly statement gives you more time to dispute costs. Often, there is a window of opportunity for disputing the monthly billing. Allocating additional resources to keep the TEM system updated gives you more lead time and helps you prepare a case for a solid dispute.

COST MANAGEMENT

This may be the most important part of cost containment efforts at your organization. By periodically reviewing and revising contracts and billing, you can react to problems and get a resolution much faster. Storing important information in your TEM system can help you prepare for changes. For example, you can include the start and end date of contracts in your system and add triggers that give you time to prepare for renegotiating your deal with various carriers.

Carriers also periodically review contracts and change rates. If you want to take advantage of new rates or grandfather advantageous rates into the new contract, a TEM system can help you prepare what-if scenarios that show what the carrier stands to gain by continuing to do business with you — even at a discounted rate. More than likely, your organization deals with multiple carriers with complicated service levels and rate expectations. By monitoring your services against the benchmark, you can potentially drive continuous improvement both internally and externally from your various carriers. You can also take advantage of discounts for service interruptions and other contract violations.

Cost management strategies must change with technology and service expectations in the industry. This is almost impossible to do without automation and reporting capabilities such as that available in a TEM system. While many aspects of telecommunications are appropriately handled in-house, it might make sense to outsource your billing and contract management to TEM experts. This allows you to take advantage of all possible cost savings and billing disputes.