Saturday, September 20, 2008
It used to be simple to manage telecom expense; you had some local phone lines and a long distance telephone bill to review. As your business grew you added a PRI circuit to handle the growing number of calls and started adding Frame Relay services to connect your locations. Today you have multiple call centers that utilize VOIP gateways and you are converting many Point to Point circuits to MPLS. You have more wireless devices deployed then you thought possible and just trying to keep track of and support the end users is taxing your IT staff. Throw in the accounting department that has to reconcile the wireless devices to the wireless plans, along with validating the return of company assets as employees leave the company and you have a system that is ripe to cause budgetary leak. The stacks of telecom bills have gotten smaller only because your service providers are now sending your monthly telecom invoices to you on CD's.
To successfully manage telecom expense in the ever changing business environment you need to research telecom expense management software solutions that will integrate your company's internal software with a robust telecom expense management reporting package. When any local service, circuit, network asset, or wireless device is turned up or down the system will automatically track the changes and even issue an electronic order to the carrier to cancel the line charge, it will then conduct an audit of that circuit against the carriers invoice and notify you if the line item charge is still appearing so that you can request a refund for the time the service was canceled but still billed.
If you don't feel your company is ready for such a system as the managed telecom expense software solution, I strongly suggest that you research the different telecom auditors that offer their services usually on a contingency based performance percentage. You only pay a fee based upon the actual savings realized on your invoicing, make sure that you have a baseline established before the telecom audit so that you can establish the true savings when your invoices start arriving after the recommended changes take effect. The recovery fee is based on the same principle and is due when a credit or check from the carrier who over charged you for their services is issued.
To successfully manage telecom expense in the ever changing business environment you need to research telecom expense management software solutions that will integrate your company's internal software with a robust telecom expense management reporting package. When any local service, circuit, network asset, or wireless device is turned up or down the system will automatically track the changes and even issue an electronic order to the carrier to cancel the line charge, it will then conduct an audit of that circuit against the carriers invoice and notify you if the line item charge is still appearing so that you can request a refund for the time the service was canceled but still billed.
If you don't feel your company is ready for such a system as the managed telecom expense software solution, I strongly suggest that you research the different telecom auditors that offer their services usually on a contingency based performance percentage. You only pay a fee based upon the actual savings realized on your invoicing, make sure that you have a baseline established before the telecom audit so that you can establish the true savings when your invoices start arriving after the recommended changes take effect. The recovery fee is based on the same principle and is due when a credit or check from the carrier who over charged you for their services is issued.
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1 Comment:
I would agree there are benefits to using both Telecom Expense Management Software and using auditors. Auditors are attractive because as you mention you only pay them if they find savings whereas with TEM software there is a fee.
We recently created a hybrid where we initially perform a contingency audit to find savings but rather than paying us you get to apply the savings to our Telecom Expense Management Software. This eliminates the concern of purchasing software without the guarantee of an ROI.
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