Defeat bill errors with TEM

Telecom Expense Management Defeats Billing Errors by Peter Verhoeff

How do you tell if your company's telecom bill is correct? Even a home phone bill can be so intimidating that most people just pay it without much inspection. According to the Aberdeen Group, telecom is one of the largest and most poorly organized spend categories in most companies. Eighty-five percent of telecom invoices are not audited, even though seven to twelve percent of all charges are in error, which indicates the pressing need for better telecom expense management.

With the average enterprise spending about 4% of its revenue on telecom, billing errors can amount to many thousands of dollars at large corporations. The above figure does not even take into account inaccurate inventory records. Horror stories abound about telecom billings continuing for employees' cell phones long after they have left the company, or being billed for branch locations that no longer exist.

Telecom Expense Management (TEM) is the body of knowledge that deals with telephone bill tracking, call detail recording and related issues. This involves three important data sources:

1) Inventory of telecom equipment 2) Telecom invoices 3) Contract and tariff information

Inventory is needed to ensure that the company knows what it is paying for, the invoices tell what they are getting billed for, and the contract and tariff information determines how much the company should be paying for these services.

But that is only part of the story. Large corporations receive large volumes of telecom invoices every month that would be extremely difficult and time-consuming to verify. Computers can help, but the sheer volume of data is such that even computers are often unable to keep up. In fact, it was not until the advent of in-memory databases, capable of processing data at lightning speed, and applying that technology to telecom data processing, that it has been feasible to process all the needed data in real-time for large enterprises.

With a telecom expense management system of this type, companies can expect to save between 10 and 30 percent on telecom expenses, in addition to better control of their telecom inventory.

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.