If you’re wondering which mobile management model is the best option for your organization, there’s a good, straight-to-the-point study written by Pankaj Gupta, the founder of Amtel (News - Alert), laying out in stark contrast the points you’ll want to consider.
For example, your choices boil down to Company Managed or Individual Fixed Stipend (IL/CL, IRU/CRU).
Individual Liable or Stipend Model (IL, IRU), as Gupta explains it, is when an organization offers a flat stipend to their employees towards reimbursement of their mobile service charges: “Individuals buy their own services, decide which features to put on their phones, and when to use the phones. The company adds a fixed amount to the employee's pay check as a reimbursement towards mobile spend.”
This is good in that it provides low accounting and IT overhead, but there are a number of drawbacks Gupta elucidates, including the facts that it doesn’t get corporate purchasing power for plans and devices, there’s no pooling optimization of calling plans, since employees own the phone, if they leave the organization, they can possibly take away all the clients and the company can no longer have compliance on employee call records.
Those are just some of the scariest consequences of this approach. Gupta also points out that with such a method, the organization cannot enforce security and usage policies, it’s a heck of a security risk to have company call records and contacts on personal devices, and employees -- not yours, we know, but some other company’s employees -- might not use the phone for corporate purposes, saving minutes for personal use.
Oh, and the IRS requires that the reimbursement be considered as taxable income to the employees. They won’t mind that though, we’re sure.
With Individual Liable with Corporate Discount, the organization negotiates discounts with the carrier. Employees then buy the equipment and plans. Invoices are then reimbursed via travel and entertainment expenses or fixed stipend. It has basically the same benefit(s) and drawbacks as the previous model.
Then there’s the Corporate Liable Centralized Model (CL, CRU), where the organization provides the device and the calling plans, there’s a corporate discount, the organization owns all the phones and billing is consolidated and managed centrally. This allows for such benefits as pooling optimization of calling plans, centralized tracking and management of mobile devices procurement and bill paying and complete IRS compliance.
The drawback is that it’s perceived as an expensive proposition.
Gupta offers more advantages of the Corporate Liable Centralized Model in the paper linked above, it’s a good read for those who are interested.
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David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Juliana Kenny