With the dust starting to settle after the accelerated digital transformation of the pandemic, now is an opportune moment for enterprises to review and simplify their mobile environments. Given that hybrid and remote work are more common now than they were in 2020, businesses should evaluate whether their mobile deployment and cost management frameworks still make sense.

In this environment, employees are making more extensive use of mobile data and many are cutting back on their usage of mobile voice services. During the past three years, we have seen 5G rollouts accelerate, load shedding increase, and workers become more reliant on cloud apps and services to do their jobs. These factors have also increased mobile data consumption.

Many businesses with larger mobile fleets are thus facing increasing costs and higher complexity in managing mobile device and service costs. Bill shock and high levels of wastage may occur where a company has not put in place cutting-edge tools and processes that offer visibility into and control over the mobile environment.

At the same time, mobile broadband has a key role to play in supporting efficiency and productivity in the workforce. Smarter companies want to get the balance right between enabling their teams and keeping costs under control. This is all about putting in place solutions that introduce discipline and accountability without hindering people as they do their jobs.

Here is a guide to the steps organisations can take to simplify mobile expense management and ensure it is aligned with today’s business needs:

Get business buy-in to review mobile costs and performance: If the finance or technology function believes there is scope to optimise mobile costs, an ideal starting point is to get buy-in from business users to review the mobile environment. This can help lay the groundwork for a culture of shared accountability and cost discipline.

Benchmarking costs: The first step towards smarter cost management is to audit the company’s current spend and evaluate its ability to correctly allocate costs to users or teams as well as to control overspending. Enterprises can partner with a knowledgeable expert like Nebula to benchmark financial, technical, and contractual elements of the mobile environment against industry peers and market averages.

Assess deployment frameworks and billing models: Now may also be a good time to review the mobile deployment model. Is the framework—be it bring your own device (BOYD), corporate-owned, personally enabled (COPE), or corporate-sponsored—enabling the workforce while optimising spending? Again, external expertise can help.

Implement processes and solutions: Companies should embrace cutting-edge mobile expense management practices and tools to optimise spending and simplify operations. Automated solutions enable an organisation to proactively manage its environment, prevent bill shocks, and automate manual tasks to free the team to focus on its core deliverables.

Continuous optimisation: There is a range of levers a smarter company can push to optimise costs once it has visibility into its environment. These include service provider consolidation, addressing billing anomalies, terminating unused or poorly priced contracts and services, and reducing end-user overspending and wastage. This is a continuous process of identifying and leveraging opportunities to improve.

Accelerate mobile expense management with OneView

While telecom expense management isn’t only about the tools, the right solutions can help a team guide spending and gain better visibility into spending across different cloud providers. OneView Mobile Expense Management from Nebula is a smarter way to get real-time control over and visibility into mobile spending and performance.

It makes it easy to track individual users, teams, and entire departments to identify usage trends and allocate costs accurately as well as prevent overspending and bill shock. It’s a cutting-edge toolset that enables companies to proactively manage their mobile environments and automate operations.

Keen to hear more about Nebula and OneView? Get in touch with our knowledgeable experts.