In a challenging economic climate, every company is scrutinising its line budget closely to identify possible cost savings. Mobile expenses, including device, data and voice costs, are one area where companies can find low-hanging fruit. Smarter mobile expense management practices and tools can help your business to achieve significant cost savings.
These solutions have evolved rapidly over the past few years, and can play a central role in helping your business to optimise costs as you roll out your hybrid work and digital transformation strategy. Here is our guide to some of the key trends that are shaping the mobile expense management market:
Smarter automation: Cutting edge mobile expense management solutions enable you to simplify operations by automating most of the processes associated with monitoring, managing and tracking across your mobile ecosystem. We can expect integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into these solutions to help companies to automate even more of their processes in years to come.
Hybrid working and digital transformation: Many companies are seeing data costs rising because of their migration to the cloud and adoption of more flexible, mobile ways of working and collaborating. Mobile expense management has become a priority for companies to manage telecom costs and device inventory across geographically dispersed workforce.
Understanding and managing bring your own device (BYOD): Today, most companies support BYOD as the device ownership model for all or part of their workforce. Smarter implementation of BYOD supports end-user choice and helps your company can save costs on hardware. But mobile expense management is key to track business and personal usage in BYOD environments.
Empowering people with mobile apps and tools: Mobile apps and tools for employee self-service have become a key part of the employee experience. Mobile expense management apps simplify life for your employees by helping them to manage and monitor their own bill, package, data bundles and usage.
Integrated solutions: Knowledgeable CIOs today are looking for integrated solutions that allow them to get better real-time visibility of data as well as to automate and control processes end-to-end. Cutting edge mobile expense management solutions offer full integration with your key service providers.
This makes it easy to gather data about data, voice and cloud usage and expenditure across all providers. Integration with third party applications such as service request and ERP systems will further simplify managing isolated processes such as chargebacks, reimbursements and service requests.
Growing compliance pressures: Organisations in most sectors face a growing compliance burden, including tougher data privacy laws and regulations and more rigorous auditing requirements. They are turning to mobile expense management solutions to get an accurate data source for audits as well as to onboard and offboard employees in compliance with company policies and regulations such as RICA.
Green technology: With the global drive to net zero, companies are expected to manage their technology environment in a more environmentally friendly way. The technology industry is increasingly focusing on upcycling, refurbishing and recycling devices rather than sending them to a landfill. Cutting edge technology expense management solutions can help companies manage the obsolescence of their devices in line with these imperatives.
Most organisations with distributed workforces can benefit from smarter mobile expense management. These solutions give you complete visibility into mobile spending, so you can optimise expenditure, budget more effectively, eliminate wastage, and make better decisions regarding vendors, contracts, and user needs.
We have helped many companies on their digital transformation and cost optimisation journeys over the past 20-plus years. Get in touch to learn how our knowledgeable teams can help you simplify complex IT and telecoms tasks, embrace best practices for DevOps and FinOps, and ultimately, accelerate digital transformation.