Telecom Expense Management Featured Article

All enterprises must budget for telecom expenses. But unfortunately many also shell out money unnecessarily for erroneous charges and inefficient billing practices. A telecom expense management (TEM) service is the solution, trimming the fat from the telecom budget by ensuring that all assets are efficiently managed and paid for.

 

There are many root causes of wasted telecom spending. Some of these are listed below.

 

Manual Invoice Processing – Manually going through phone bills is a very time consuming process that costs money in man hours. It is also an unnecessary endeavor since the technology now exists to automate most or all of the process, freeing the enterprise workforce to spend time on more pressing matters.

 

Bills for Unused Services – All too often, a particular telecom asset that was once in use now lies dormant, but it still paid for. An effective TEM program ferrets out such wasted resources and either eliminates or reallocates them.

 

Under-utilized Services – Especially with mobile services, it’s easy to pay for more service than is needed. By employing TEM, it becomes easy to see where there is excess service being paid for and make necessary adjustments.

 

Decentralized Procurement – This is another problems that’s especially inherent with mobile services, since employees tend to use mobile devices for both personal and business use. Employees may also get reimbursed manually for business-related charges. The problem here is that individual ownership and management of services means the enterprise can’t take advantage of group discounts. Centralized procurement is part of any good TEM initiative.

 

TEM typically is divided into three main areas: inventory management, bill auditing and usage optimization. When these three tools are applied efficiently, enterprises can save significant amounts of money on their telecom expenses without employees even noticing the difference (except possibly in a positive way).

 

To learn more about the benefits of TEM, please visit the Telecom Expense Management channel on TMCnet.com, brought to you by Rivermine (News - Alert).