Complexity has spiralled in most companies’ telecoms environments, with trends like cloud computing, bring your own device (BYOD) and hybrid work making it harder to monitor and manage costs. Organisations can vastly simplify management of their telecom environments by adopting smarter telecom expense management (TEM) systems and processes.
Cutting edge TEM supports your digital transformation efforts by enabling you to gain control over telecoms spending and performance. Every cent that you save on fixed-line, mobile and cloud services will drop right down to your bottom line, meaning that TEM is one of the smarter investments a business can make.
Here's a 10-step guide to smarter TEM:
- Audit your current expenses
A comprehensive audit of all current telecom expenses is an ideal starting point in a journey to smarter TEM. Review invoices, contracts, and usage patterns to identify overspending and potential inefficiencies.
- Establish a centralised system
A centralised TEM business solution will enable you to track, allocate and manage telecom expenses across your entire business. You will have a centralised view of your telecoms spending as well as the ability to get a granular view of contracts, invoices, and usage data across different users and cost centres.
- Review vendor and service provider contracts
With insights from your audit in hand, you can review vendor and service provider contracts to ensure that they meet your needs. You can terminate unused contracts, adjust plans to ensure you’re getting the best tariffs possible, and negotiate with providers to get better rates and terms.
- Guide users with clear policies
An acceptable usage policy is key to keeping telecom costs under control. Educate users about how much money they can spend on data and voice calls and how they should report and claim for spending. Enforce these policies fairly and consistently to avoid overspending.
- Track costs in real time
To avoid bill shocks, leading companies monitor telecom usage and costs in real time. With today’s TEM tools, you can alert users when they are exceeding their voice and data usage limits or when they are incurring out-of-bundle costs. Leading TEM solutions offer an end-user mobile app that helps them stay within set limits via live usage tracking.
- Streamline service requests
Cutting edge TEM can help you simplify ordering and changing of infrastructure—for example, for new branch openings and upgrades. Such a solution will integrate with your service request system, making it easy to log and track all requests such as SIM swaps and bundle administration through a single, digital portal.
- Train employees on cost-saving practices
Educate end-users about best practices such as using Wi-Fi rather than mobile data whenever possible and minimising international roaming. Awareness can contribute significantly to expense reduction.
- Keep optimising
TEM is an ongoing process. It’s important to continuously review spending, monitor industry trends, evaluate contracts and service providers and adjust your telecom management plan to minimise costs.
- Embrace benchmarking
One of the reasons why wastage and overspending occurs is that companies do not keep up to date with the cutting edge practices around managing costs in their industry. Leaders use internal and external benchmarking to assess their wastage. A good TEM solution provider can help you understand whether your spending is in line with industry best practices.
- Go beyond telecoms
TEM is a good starting point for technology cost savings—but don’t forget about rising cloud costs. Many cutting edge TEM solution providers can help you implement FinOps tools and practices that will help you to achieve further cost savings.
We enable companies to accelerate of digital transformation and simplify the complexity of their technology environments. Contact us to find out how our knowledgeable team can help you to simplify operations and reduce costs with smarter TEM, DevOps and FinOps practices.