Wireless Expense Management Reporting

Since the break-up of the Bell companies in the early 80s, there have been many new complex telecom technologies, services and plans and a variety of telecom providers that have entered the telecom space. With these complexities, come opportunities as well as threats for telecom users. One of the threats that has come with divestiture has been inaccurate billing, usually caused by the use of legacy billing systems designed to handle a basic, simple mix of circuits and services, and utilizing codes that were developed by the Bell companies around those services. 

As more complex, negotiated rates and services have come about with more competition, there is a propensity for errors in data entry of contracted rates and for legacy billing systems to apply the inappropriate charge, most in favor of the telecom supplier. To make matters worse, in the past 20 years, there have been numerous mergers and acquisitions among telecom vendors requiring the merging of disparate billing systems. This has dramatically exacerbated the problem.

Telecom users in North America spend a significant amount of money on telecom services and equipment. Telecom services are defined as “fixed”(also known as “wired” or “wireline”) including local, long distance/800, conference calling, wide area network (WAN) and internet; and “wireless” including cellular, blackberries, PDAs, smart phones and pagers. According to Forrester, “typically 3% to 6% of an enterprise’s gross revenues are spent on telecom services with 72% of the average North American enterprise telecom services’ budget spent on landline and 28% on wireless services.” 

These companies are challenged with the management of carrier billing that is complex and fraught with errors.  Forrester estimates that “billing errors average 5% to 12% of ongoing telecom services budgets.”  In addition, during the past 20 years of auditing telecom invoices, Valicom has found that over 35% of invoices have some type of error, discrepancy or overcharge in them. Based on this, it is prudent to err on the side of caution when auditing your telecom invoices.

To learn more about the best approaches to performing telecom audits and expense management functions for your organization, read Valicom's whitepaper entitled "Can TEM SaaS Solutions Lower Your Telecom Expenses For Mid-Market Companies?" OR go this link to download a streaming vido of the webinar sponsored by Valicom about this topic.

OK, excluding the wide array of jerky products, what’s the coolest thing about the 7-11?  Easy:  it’s ALWAYS open. 

In all the hubbub over Telecom Expense Management, one subject that gets lost is the topic of openness.    In other words, does your telecom management solution truly support the way YOU do business?   

Asking a TEM software vendor to perform modifications is fine and, sure, sometimes a few tweaks are needed in order to ensure you can reach your strategic cost reduction goals and get the telecom expense analysis completed accurately and expeditiously.  Still, there’s something to be said for understanding what your telecom expense management software was really engineered to do.   Some specifics in this regard include:
 

• Does your telecom expense management system handle only carrier expenses or can it also house peripheral items like phone system leases, hardware specs, and other areas that should logically be grouped with telecom carrier expenses?

•  Is your system equipped to handle your current account coding structure and expense allocation strategy? 
   
• Is it flexible enough to adapt easily if your business environment changes?

•  If you outsource telecom management functions, can your provider adapt to changing needs for telecom expense reporting and trending?

•  Can your telecom software mimic the workflow your company uses to process telecom invoices and related data?   

These are all key questions to consider in evaluating telecom expense management solutions and, again, openness is the key to the lockless door at the 7-11.  -SAM

www.valicomcorp.com
 

You see, I don’t really understand how putting in after market features like leather wraps on steering wheels and hanging dice fuzzy enough to make Elvis jealous are considered “custom” unless the eventual owner of the car is allowed to choose these features. 

In the world of telecom expense management, this same rule should apply.   If you’re paying for telecom cost management software or any other expense management services, there are certain things that should be customized especially for you.    For example, if you outsource telecom functions, such as telecom invoice payment, your TEM provider should provide your with payment feeds in the format your AP system is expecting.   You should also have the ability to get telecom stats that are summarized in a report that has the format and data of your choosing.   Insist that your software has workflow capabilities that match the way you do business. In short, demand a solution customized to your environment. 

Insisting on customization helps you in another way too – by drastically pairing down the list of telecom expense management companies with whom you’re willing to do business. There are simply not many of us out there who have taken telecom cost management and made it customer-centric. Call us and let us put the “custom” back in “customer”. -SAM

Over the last decade, most organizations have reclassified their internal telecom expense management as an IT function and handed the responsibility to an already overburdened IT staff that is generally not knowledgeable about telecom services. In addition, a well-managed internal telecom expense function involves a cooperative effort between the IT/Telecom staff and the Accounts Payable staff. This also requires streamlined, well-defined and automated processes. With the complexities of telecom services including tens, hundreds or thousands of monthly invoices, circuits or devices, using spreadsheets and other manual processes for managing telecom expenses has added to the challenges of in-house telecom expense management for most businesses today. This underscores the need for the automation of TEM processes whether in-sourced or outsourced. According to Gartner, “at the heart of any TEM offering is an automated software platform used by the business or by an external service provider managing a company’s telecom invoices and assets.”


There are also many market pressures that are driving the need for TEM investments for enterprises today. According to Aberdeen, these include “financial regulations (SOX compliance), implementation of new technology, globalization, carrier consolidation and security concerns (wireless e-mail/PDAs with sensitive data that is not centrally managed).” In addition, the economic climate is driving the need for cost reduction in areas that were otherwise ignored in past years.

Because of these reasons, it is difficult for corporations to get their arms around their telecom expenses. According to Aberdeen, “most firms manage less than 67% of their telecom expenses.”

Clearview, Valicom's telecom cost management software, is designed to address today's market pressures and client's needs for TEM automation. The system workflow is built to incorporate best practices and tools for greater operational efficiencies, telecom expense control and strategic cost reduction. Contact us today for a free Clearview demonstration!!

• Manual Auditing  - this approach usually involves an individual performing research and basic auditing tasks on thee own with a learn-as-you-go approach.
• Software Auditing - in-house employees use specialized software to optimize usage and billing. Historically this has included software provided by vendors that have an impact on the company's Information Technology (IT) infrastructure. Some software providers will also offer a Web interface to a hosted model.
• Enterprise  - analytical tools automatically reconcile detailed billing, inventory and payment processing. These type of systems usually require significant care and feeding and due to the complexity require dedicated staff.
• Outsourced or Managed services - many options are available to companies to manage specific TEM life-cycle activities and cost allocation.

The telecommunications industry is known for being made up of enormous, bloated companies who can’t help but, to treat their customers as just another number on a balance sheet. Especially if your organization is average in size – which puts you in the same category of just about every organization in the US.

Valicom provides a barrier between you and the big telecommunications companies. Through a relationship with Valicom, you can enjoy a dedicated project team and project manager who will learn all of the smallest details about your organization and how it operates.

And those automated call systems you have to navigate for 20 minutes before you actually get to talk to a person? You’ll never have to put up with that either. At Valicom, everyone is just a phone call away – and you’ll never have to answer questions asked by a computer.

This personal approach is important to managing your telecommunications expenses – not just because it’s a great way to treat others, but also because it promotes an environment of productivity, trust and constant improvement that is difficult to achieve working directly with the carriers.

Be warned though, you won’t find this personal touch at every Telecom Expense Management (TEM). But I absolutely guarantee you’ll find it at Valicom.

Since it seems that most people believe that Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) is the original cellular technology, having been introduced in the 1980’s years before CDMA’s (Code Division Multiple Access...2G and 3G) introduction in the early 1990’s, I thought I would provide some interesting details to how CDMA came to be.

While GSM is in fact older from a commercial standpoint – CDMA technology is actually older overall, and was first developed at the beginning of World War II. The original application was as a method for remotely controlling torpedoes. At that time though, it was never implemented due to a lack of feasibility in the current technological climate.

As transmission technology improved, it wasn’t long before the US military began using CDMA to send and receive secure messages during the cold war. Because CDMA uses spread-spectrum technology – which is the process of dividing messages into tiny fragments and sending them over several different frequencies – CDMA is inherently secure.

Each fragment is tagged with a code that only the sender and receiver know, and thus the overall message can’t be reassembled by someone in the middle intercepting the fragmented data.

In the mid-1980's, the US government declassified CDMA technology, and a few years later it began to be tested for commercial use.

So the answer is:  CDMA.

For additional valuable information just like this, turn the the experts at Valicom for proper Telecom Expense Management with the ability to reduce business costs. 

Often in organizations, telecommunications expenses are allocated at too high of a level, without regard for the type of usage or the purpose of the service. This kind of high level accounting can short-circuit existing internal incentives that are designed to reduce costs.

If managers, department heads and other personnel who are responsible for various slices of an organization’s budget aren’t provided with enough information about their telecommunications expenses, it won’t even occur to them to make decisions that lead to reductions in costs.

This is typically where the AP folks explain that they don’t have anywhere near enough time to allocate costs to such a granular level – not to mention they wouldn’t know where to start. This is telecom after all, and who understands that?

Valicom does.

By partnering with a time-tested and proven Telecom Expense Management (TEM) firm, you get to take advantage of highly refined processes that make granular cost allocation a breeze. Valicom has been adapting and enhancing cost allocation processes for nearly 20 years – and can seamlessly provide much greater levels of detail to almost any existing AP system.

The visibility and exposure that can be provided to the members of your management team through better cost allocation will empower them to make better decisions that reduce costs and streamline your telecommunications spend.

Contact Valicom today to acheive rapid business savings!