Telecom Expense Management (TEM) provides full visibility across your telecom ecosystem, enabling much-needed cost savings and efficiency improvements. To maximize the benefits associated with TEM, it’s important to avoid making some common mistakes.
Here are the top-five telecom expense management pitfalls for 2021 and how to avoid them.
1. A Haphazard Onboarding and Offboarding
Onboarding and offboarding is a complicated area when it comes to telecom expense management, because it usually receives little attention (despite being critical to employee success, security, and cost savings). When an employee joins your organization, your TEM provider should create a frictionless yet rigorous process to ensure they are set up with the devices and applications they need in accordance with strict security protocols. When that employee leaves, you don’t want them to take the devices with them or leave them in a desk drawer. You also certainly don’t want to be paying for their coverage and applications once they stop contributing to your organization. Your TEM provider should set up the mechanisms and workflows necessary to trigger a secure, comprehensive offboarding process for every departing employee.
2. Auditing Without an Accurate Inventory
With the chaos going on in the world today, updating your telecom inventory may not be at the top of your priority list, but it should be. It is impossible to perform an effective audit of your telecom assets without an accurate view of inventory. While your TEM provider can certainly help you in this area, you can’t rely on your telecom expense management partner to solve all of your inventory problems. It will take a team effort. They can’t produce the cost savings you need with inaccurate data records.
3. Not Capturing as Much Inventory Data as Possible In Your TEM Platform
Your TEM platform shouldn’t just be used for telecom expense management. There are attributes associated with devices and circuits that should be captured within your platform that benefit the entire enterprise. For example, when an engineer needs to inquire into a circuit, they can go to the TEM database as opposed to relying on Google Sheets to provide information by landline and location. When working with the right TEM vendor, your platform should and will become a trusted source that provides visibility across departments.
4. Thinking In-House Is Cheaper
While working out of Google Sheets may seem like the cheaper option, most organizations need to invest in TEM software to not only save money, but to make money. Any in-house option, even the most advanced, won’t offer the degree of advanced analytics, revenue predictions, asset tracking, and cost savings that come with a TEM provider. When in-house labor is accurately accounted for, allowing you to calculate the opportunity cost of what internal staff could be providing by not working on TEM, organizations realize that getting help from a good TEM provider is almost always a lower cost option.
5. Poor End-Of-Life Asset Disposal
Is your organization undergoing an asset refresh? Changing from Android devices to iPhones? Or simply getting rid of old devices that no longer perform as they should? Asset management isn’t only important for assets that are currently in use,
but also for those you intend to get rid of. In order to minimize waste and maximize ROI, work with a TEM provider that can securely erase data from the devices, recycle unwanted devices, and re-sell at the best price when appropriate.
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If your organization is experiencing any of these pitfalls, it may be time to re-evaluate your
telecom ecosystem and partnerships. With WidePoint’s TEM solutions, your business will achieve
full visibility into your telecom inventory to achieve optimal cost savings and mitigate risks.
