Telecom Expense Management

Telecom Expense Management: Reducing Costs by Boosting Individual Accountability

Part 2 - The Solution

Visibility and Accountability

In Part 1 of this post, we explored the connection between visibility to telecom usage and accountability for telecom spend at the level of the individual user. Visibility at this level is important, because this is the organizational level where most telecom costs are incurred. When individuals have visibility into their own telecom use, they will moderate their use and reduce their spend significantly. Providing this visibility – and reaping the benefits of the accountability it enables – requires a TEM solution equal to the task.

TEM Capabilities to Look For

Leading TEM-enabling technology delivers visibility to individual usage and spend and improves accountability and cost savings across the enterprise. The best solutions will allow you to:

• Collect telecom data from both wireline and wireless sources: CDR sources provide near-real-time visibility into wireline activity; invoices provide detailed data on both wireline and wireless usage. By combining this information in a single database, integrated TEM systems provide a comprehensive view of telecom spend that can be analyzed, allocated, and reported in multiple ways.
• Allocate costs to various levels of the organization: TEM systems that allow you to incorporate your organization structure (e.g., by synchronizing with Active Directory) allow you to report usage and spend to multiple levels of the organization. The ability to automate and schedule reporting can be a huge time-saver.
• Process invoices electronically: Allocation is predicated on getting expenses into the system in the first place, and for large organizations with hundreds or thousands of invoice pages per month, manual processing of paper invoices is simply not feasible. Leading TEM providers will configure their solutions to accept invoices from carriers in electronic form.
• Management by exception: Leading solutions will allow you to configure alerts to notify you of expenses that need attention, such as charges that don’t match prices in the system, charges from unfamiliar providers, late fees, and pay-per-use charges for services such as directory assistance and *69 calls.
• Secure, confidential reporting: The most sophisticated TEM systems provide secure Web portals that let each individual in the organization view their own charges, reports, and assigned inventory. Armed with this information, personnel can make responsible choices with regard to usage of telecom resources.

When individuals are given visibility into the cost consequences of their telecom use, they become more accountable and tend to reduce their usage and use telecom resources in a more cost-effective way. If you’re looking into TEM solutions for your organization, be sure to consider technology that supports visibility and cost accountability at all levels of the enterprise – and especially at the level of the individual telecom user.

Veramark Technologies is a leading provider of Telecom Expense Management and Call Accounting Solutions.

Telecom Expense Management: Reducing Costs by Boosting Individual Accountability

Part 1 – The Challenge

The Key to Accountability

Unlike most other top corporate expenses, telecom expenses are incurred by individuals, at their own discretion, whenever and wherever they see fit. But in most organizations, these costs are monitored at an aggregate level (if at all). To incur costs at one level and monitor them at another short-circuits the feedback loop that is necessary for accountability. You can’t manage what you can’t see.

When individuals have visibility into their own telecom use, they will moderate their use and reduce their spend significantly. The more they know about the impact of their behavior, the more likely it is that they will align their usage with corporate goals and objectives.

Challenges to Making it Work

The connection between visibility and individual accountability is not difficult to understand, but the challenges to actually providing this visibility are numerous:

• Capturing all wireline and wireless expenses –– and allocating them to the individuals who incurred them. Solutions must be highly automated to process lengthy invoices efficiently and avoid sending labor costs through the roof.
• Identifying expenses that are outside of acceptable thresholds, inconsistent with contract pricing, or otherwise subject to discovery and dispute. These are the expenses that deserve extra scrutiny.
• Presenting each individual with their own charges. Once you know the costs incurred by each person in the organization, how do you share that information in a confidential and cost-effective manner?
•  Automatically handling personnel turnover and cost center changes without losing data or wrongly allocating charges. The system must be intelligent enough to know what to do with charges allocated to an entity that has been terminated.

The right TEM solution can solve all these problems. Look for details in our next blog posting: Telecom Expense Management: Reducing Costs by Boosting Individual Accountability – Part 2: The Solution.

Veramark Technologies is a leading provider of Telecom Expense Management and Call Accounting Solutions.

How long does it take to implement a Telecom Expense Management solution and see the ROI?

Contributed by Josh Bouk, Veramark’s Senior Vice President of Global Services

This is a very popular question and there is a great deal of "marketing" around these timelines. In all honesty, a Telecom Expense Management (TEM) implementation typically requires 90 days on the very short side. You really can't do it faster than that, even when the stars align. Our average implementation time is closer to 4 1/2 months, perhaps up to 6 months, depending on how centralized the organization is.

The more centralized the organization, the faster the implementation can be completed. If it's a large international organization with decentralized invoice management, it takes a little longer to pull in all those invoices, redirect invoices from the carriers – and most importantly, pull in and get mindshare of the individuals who are doing procurement, ordering new services, and negotiating contracts. But ultimately, it is well worth the time invested!

What we find for TEM ROI in the first year is usually at least a 2 to 1 ratio. The payback is usually somewhere in month 5 or 6, in terms of a break even standpoint. From there on, the whole program is typically run out of savings. It's a rare event that that wouldn't happen.

Veramark Technologies is a leading provider of telecom expense management and Call Accounting Solutions.

View a recent interview with Josh Bouk about TEM at http://vimeo.com/11167946

How TEM BPO Services Typically Work

TEM Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services are built to suit your business requirements. You can take advantage of any or all BPO services.

Invoice Loading
Invoice loading includes efficiently consolidating wireless and wireline invoices, converting paper invoices to e-Bills, and loading invoices into the TEM-enabling system—relieving your in-house staff of this chore. Compared to manual methods, invoice loading services dramatically reduce labor costs and processing time. Invoices come directly to the TEM provider, who loads them into the TEM-enabling system.

Invoice Processing
After invoices have been loaded into the TEM system, the TEM provider will manage the entire invoice processing workflow for you. Every wireless and wireline invoice is validated against inventory and other configurable thresholds within TEM software. The vendor facilitates the coding and approval process to reduce cycle times and mitigate the risk of incurring late payment fees. The TEM experts will analyze invoices to find additional opportunities to optimize services and reduce expenses to make sure you receive the telecom services you need at the best possible rates.

Dispute Management
The TEM services team works directly with your vendors every day. They understand the subtle differences between carriers and how to best work with each to settle disputes rapidly. They will vigorously pursue the recovery of credits on your behalf for any carrier overcharges. Dispute management services allow you to leverage the expertise of the TEM services team, while keeping your staff focused on core capabilities and strategic objectives.

Bill Payment
The TEM provider will pay all your approved wireless and wireline invoices on your behalf and present you with a single monthly bill for the total amount. The bill payment service ensures prompt, accurate payment of approved charges. Labor costs and risks of payment errors (both underpayment and overpayment) and late payment (and resulting penalties) are minimized.

Ordering and Provisioning
Ordering and Provisioning services help you reduce off-contract orders and meet your minimum annual revenue commitment (MARC) contract requirements. The TEM software has configurable workflows that give you centralized control over enterprise requests and approvals for wireless and wireline device and service orders, while the TEM services team keeps you continuously informed of order status and ensures that you receive the level of vendor service that your business requires.

Ordering and Provisioning BPO will:

• Manage all orders through a Service Portal
• Validate orders against negotiated contracts and corporate policies
• Ensure appropriate pricing for standard orders and configurations
• Automate the approval routing process
• Manage vendor fulfillment to ensure SLA compliance
• Receive, charge, pack, and ship wireless devices

Help Desk
TEM BPO includes wireless and wireline help desk services.

• Wireless – The help desk team will assist callers in resolving issues related to wireless device problems and usability issues.
• Wireline – If wireline service fails at any of your locations, one call or email to a centralized help desk will get your dial tone back. It is the TEM provider’s business to know every local telecom carrier servicing each of your offices, so they know exactly who to call and how to get fast action to resolve connectivity issues.

Veramark Technologies is a leading provider of Telecom Expense Management and Call Accounting solutions.