Telecom Expense Management Featured Article

Five Steps to a Successful Telecom Expense Management Initiative

Organizations spend between 3 and 5 percent of their annual telecom budget simply managing expenses. Telecom expense management (TEM) services can help organizations quickly gain visibility into their communications spend patterns and identify areas for short-term and long-term savings.

John Colbert, global telecom expense management product management at IBM (News - Alert), recently issued top five criteria for assuring a successful rollout of a global telecom expense management initiative. His first piece of advice is to make sure to establish a detailed scope of the project as it helps to define what geographies, services and carriers are of highest priority.

 Once you have a detailed outline of the program, match it up with a timeline to ensure the end goal is clearly outlined. The goal of a program could be centralizing invoice processing for better control or optimizing mobile rate places to reduce costs; either way, setting deadlines and objectives help a program become successful.

Understanding who is responsible for what function helps eliminate challenges and ensure deadlines are met. Organizations should also consider how a global approach will change the management of each different function, including order management and provisioning, invoice handling and expense management and mobile help desk services, will change the management in regions.

Also thinking about multiple regions, Colbert advises addressing the added complexities that come with managing multiple regions, including languages and currencies, numerous telecom carriers, laws, policies, accounting principles, data privacy and unique local business processes.

“It's important to involve internal regional subject matter experts to provide TEM-specific guidance, and work with TEM providers with a global presence and experience who can offer strategic and operational expertise,” Colbert explained.

The fifth step to ensuring a successful telecom expense management program is clearly communicating the benefits and early successes and results of the process. Internal communication aligning with company objectives is a significant part of the process to be successful.

Utilizing IBM telecom expense management services can help organizations cut costs, increase productivity and get more from existing communications infrastructure. You may be overspending on mobile device management, overlapping telephony networks and carrier contracts, or on staff expertise applied to billing and invoice management. 

Edited by Braden Becker