Don't Overlook Labor Savings of Telecom Expense Management

When projecting the value of an enterprise solution, it’s important to consider the return on your investment. But all too often, we focus on the easy-to-calculate hard dollar returns only. In many cases, and especially for BPO solutions, the greatest savings come from productivity improvements.

For example, telecom expense management (TEM) BPO solutions will save measurable dollar amounts through invoice validation, recovery of overcharges, and avoidance of late payment penalties. It’s more difficult to measure the value of workflow automation for ordering and provisioning, MACD, help desk, and other TEM-related business processes. One way to estimate the value of process automation is to consider the dollar savings in terms of reduced full-time equivalent (FTE) labor requirements.

Labor is the single greatest expense for most organizations. Workflow automation can have a huge impact on the bottom line by reducing business process FTE requirements. For example, centralized ordering and provisioning (O&P) is a key TEM activity that offers benefits in terms of contract compliance, reduction of off-contract spend, and inventory management. These benefits are realized even if employees are calling the IT department to place each order. However, an automated O&P system, complete with self-serve online catalog and workflow, can multiply process benefits by reducing calls to IT and FTE requirements. Reduction of a single FTE can save over 100K annually.

There are multiple ways to estimate the FTE savings that an automated O&P system would generate for your organization. If you keep logs of IT service requests, you can estimate the number of calls and hours of IT labor that self-serve workflow automation would eliminate. Alternatively, you can estimate savings based on anticipated demand, number of employees and annual turnover, and planned technology refresh and budget. Similar methods can be used to determine the FTE savings of other TEM workflow solutions.

Reduced FTE demands for TEM process management means greater FTE availability for other business-critical activities, such as customer support services and strategic IT planning.