Expense Management
Telecom managers face a growing challenge in managing the growing wireless costs within the changing workplace. The numbers are significant as more organizations see wireless costs becoming a larger piece of the whole telecom pie. According various groups, the enterprise mobility market is projected to reach $5.7 billion in revenue by 2018. If an enterprise isn’t on top of its wireless landscape, it’s easy for the expenses to get out of control. The best way to gain clarity of your complete wireless landscape, is to conduct a wireless telecom audit.
An audit gives you visibility into the wireless telecom spend, identifies savings opportunities and optimizes expenses going forward. If you’ve never done one, now is the time. You could be bleeding money in hidden places such as paying for services or devices you aren’t using.
What a Wireless Telecom Audit Uncovers
An audit pulls it all together to give you a complete snapshot of:
- Current services and usage
- Contract terms
- Inventory
- Invoices
What are you using and spending?
The main focus area of your wireless telecom audit is to reveal all current services and usage. The discovery process gives you visibility into your wireless infrastructure and costs with a full list of your wireless expenses by vendor – providing the services to the breakdown of charge categories. When you look at all current services, expenses and usage, you will identify any discrepancies or opportunities to reduce expenses. This is the first step to wireless expense optimization. From there, you will uncover areas of possible wasted spend for zero use devices, charges for unnecessary features such as insurance, navigation and downloads, plus international roaming and long distance costs.
What do your contracts say?
When is the last time you read through your wireless contracts? Go through them and make sure the terms fit you now and that they’ll fit your organization’s needs going forward. Leveraging new “standard” offers and lower pricing models from competing vendors will help you negotiate more favorable rates. Eliminating offers that don’t meet your users’ needs will enable you to shift savings opportunities towards costs that are more impactful to your usage patterns.
Identifying saving opportunities
Once the wireless expense list is complete and usage trends established, cost saving opportunities can be identified. It is worth the effort – we are typically able to reduce invoice costs by 26%.
A common area for cost saving is eliminating overlapping or poorly managed services, such as purchasing a larger data pool than necessary. Another area to address includes tracking invoices on wireless expenses to avoid missing discounts, wasted spend, unused features or poor processes that compound or prolong overspending.
An experienced auditor will apply various types of account consolidation to drive additional savings as well as will refer to your mobile device policy to identify and eliminate plans and features that are not sanctioned. The savings that can be uncovered by a wireless telecom audit will free a significant amount within your IT budget.
Get 2017 started on the right foot and conduct a wireless telecom audit. Contact us to get started today. When you get full visibility of your wireless expense landscape, there are efficiencies and real savings in store for your organization.
