It is no secret that telecommunications represents a major expense for a company of any size. How do you manage your Telecommunication Expenses? You’ve might had heard the term Telecommunications Expense Management (TEM) tossed about before. But just what is it?Telecommunications Expense Management (TEM) is the methodology by which organizations can best manage one of their most critical strategic assets: the telecom. TEM encompasses the technology, processes, policy, and people needed. On the technology side, there needs to be a software platform to help inventory your Telecom assets (e.g., circuits, services, equipment, locations, invoices, accounts), enforce business processes (e.g., ordering, approving, problem resolution), and manage access to critical Telecommunications infrastructure information. The people are the experts in networking and telecom that follow the methodologies and use the software to deploy, manage, and decommission the telecom network.TEM brings together silos of technology, data, and people into one centralized and collaborative ecosystem where all the participants are interlinked and ultimately different systems can talk together: ordering talks to inventory, inventory talks to billing, ticketing talks to inventory, network management talks to inventory, network management talks to contract SLAs, etc. TEM also brings a standardized set of best practice repeatable processes to the organization using it. All order and invoice processing should happen the same way across the entire organization after TEM is deployed.Things You Can Do With TEMOnce you have all the technology, processes, policy, and people in place in your telecom organization, what types of things will you be able to do to better manage your telecom operations? The following is a sample list of some of these things:- An accurate inventory of every network element in your company
- Assess the impact of the network on the company’s bottom line
- Pay your bills on time
- Validate the accuracy of your invoices
- Allocate costs back to the appropriate organization
- Dispute invoice charges with the carrier
- Predict future network costs
- Build your telecom budget
- Optimize your existing network infrastructure
- Negotiate better contracts with your providers
- Analyze your Call Detail Reporting (CDR) from your invoices and your telephone switches
- Centralize all your telecom data into one single repository for doing data reporting, analysis, and business intelligence.All of these facets of Telecom Expense Management are related. They depend upon each other so each one can function properly. It is a comprehensive approach to controlling what is one of the greatest expenditures in many businesses. Inventory control depends upon procurement. Procurement relies on Optimization’s recommendations, and so on.With the economy being as sluggish as it is, it pays to have a professional Telecom Expense Management team come in and put that part of your business in order. Remember, they will probably save more money for you than the fees they charge, so there is really no reason not to give them a call. Find a reputable Telecom Expense Management company and see what they can do for you.