Addressing hidden costs with TEM

Addressing Hidden Costs with Telecom Expense Management by Peter Verhoeff

Prices for telecom services have dropped dramatically over the past decade, but telecom-related labor costs have not. In fact, indirect costs related to telecom can mount up to more than your company's telephone bill. This article touches on various ways manpower is used in relation to telecommunications and explains how telecom expense management (TEM) can cut those hidden costs.

Manually gathering, sorting, checking and preparing for payment all the invoices from telecom vendors is a fantastic waste of time and manpower. This is an area where automated processing can pay off big time. Most vendors now provide electronic billing and you should switch vendors if they don't.

Ideally, all your telecom invoices arrive in electronic form at a central location and are fed directly into your TEM system. There, invoice line items are compared against actual usage call detail records (CDR) and inventory data. Reports are then created, including alerts on anomalies, to prevent over billing. Telecom billing errors are not uncommon and usually in the carrier's favor.

Once the discrepancies have been sorted out and vendor invoices reconciled, the invoice data can be fed directly into the enterprise's Accounts Payable system and their payment fully automated. Having vendor invoices paid on time can in itself provide considerable savings, avoiding not only late payment penalties, but also wasted manpower, should the service be disconnected.

With more and more mobile devices in use, keeping track of company-owned cell phones, pagers, smart phones, etc., becomes a challenge. Many a company has inadvertently continued paying for ex-employees' cell phones. A good TEM system can track mobile calls and, using human resources data, monitor personnel changes to ensure that employees who are leaving return their company-owned mobile devices.

The telemanagement system can compare telecom usage against inventory, isolate traffic bottlenecks and identify problem areas to facilitate troubleshooting. A telecom management system also assists in planning and allocating future resources. Communications are thus optimized, minimizing lost production resulting from busy signals, dead phones and slow Internet connections.

Finally, by storing CDRs of all calls, including date, time, duration, origin and destination the telecom expense management system provides valuable records that speed up telecom audits. Being able to present all relevant historical information on telecom usage at a moment's notice frees up an executive's valuable time.

For more information on call accounting software, please visit Telsoft Solutions.

Author, Peter Verhoeff, writes articles on the business benefits of call accounting and call detail record technology. More information can be found at http://www.telsoft-solutions.com.