Telecom Expense Management – How Can You Benefit?

Maintaining proper control of the telecommunications environment is a critical task for any company. Enterprise organizations use Telecom Expense Management or end-to-end TEM as a practice and toolset to effectively manage their telecommunication assets, services, and expenses.

TEM typically entails monitoring and controlling expenditures, invoices, service levels, policies, and ultimately managing the entire network lifecycle.

The main reason why companies utilize the tool is to help control expenses and manage the telecom portion of their IT budget. In the past 10 years, corporate telecommunications spending has risen from being stratified as number 10 to number five in the hierarchy of budgeted items, and telecommunications spending is expected to grow even more in the coming years. TEM cannot stem the tide; however, it can help manage the costs, which can lead to controllable growth within the budget.

What is Telecom Expense Management?

A cloud-based Telecom Expense Management (TEM) solution can help you control your telecom expenses by tracking, reducing, and eliminating waste. TEM solutions are especially valuable to enterprises but in recent years smaller companies have found that they can also realize substantial savings when using a TEM system.

Using one will not only help you to achieve significant reductions in your monthly spending, but it may also even reduce or eliminate your need for an internal telecom manager altogether.

Here are ways a company can benefit by using TEM solutions:

• Asset Monitoring: Companies can monitor and audit their IT assets and services and gain valuable insights into their expenses.
• Inventory Tracking: TEM services help businesses see their technology inventory.
• Optimized Costs: Since telecommunication spend is often high, TEM services help automate and optimize costs.
• Expenditure Control: Telecom expense management solutions can help companies control their large expenditures and augment their overall IT budget.

Many large companies are experiencing the challenge of optimizing costs as they enjoy the incredible benefits of telecom infrastructure.

Seamless operation and reliable communication with clients are what a business gets when it uses versatile technology infrastructures. As more technological solutions arrive in the market, enterprise organizations struggle to keep their bottom line and balance expenses even as they embrace innovation.

Expense management becomes an imperative practice for a sustainable running of a business. Telecom expense management helps create autonomy in expense tracking systems through an automated link to various departments using numerous applications.

In the long run, less expense of manual overhead and slow response time is experienced. By enhancing data visualization, TEM programs bring an actionable understanding of IT assets and services to a business.

Key Benefits of Telecom Expense Management

Implementing telecom expense management has become a necessity for modern business enterprises. By using TEM solutions, your business stands a chance to gain key benefits such as:

• Present and Future: TEM solutions help your business have actionable insight into the present and future of technology assets and services.
• Take Actions: TEM tools allow your company to take appropriate actions on its assets such as disconnecting services.
• Asset Awareness: TEM tools help in monitoring an asset from its acquisition, deployment, and maintenance to the day it becomes obsolete.
• Contract Management: TEM solutions empower the company’s contract management with providers, usage monitoring, servicing, and payment of bills.

A comprehensive evaluation of business asset inventory goes a long way in managing data and mobile and telecom service costs. Another problem for companies is invoice errors which TEM solutions help to eliminate.

With all these benefits, a company that uses telecom expense management can save significantly on IT expenditure in the first year of implementation. Using TEM tools helps to lessen the pressure on internal resources and improves productivity by freeing the IT team to focus on more innovative endeavors.

So, if your organization still depends on using manual methods like spreadsheets, it is prudent to leverage TEM tools for better output. Less time is spent analyzing invoices, recovering funds, managing inventories, and fixing disputes using telecom expense management programs.

Check out how brightfin helped SIEMENS drive cost savings and business intelligence!

How TEM Providers Help IT Teams

There are a multitude of ways TEM providers can be helpful to the seamless operation of your IT teams:

• Centralize telecom management: Centralize voice and network assets, expenses, usage, and services across all vendors with access for admins and cost-center managers.
• Saves time and reduces spending: The IT teams need to spend much of their time innovating other valuable solutions for the enterprise organization. TEM providers help to save time by generating comprehensive expense management information hence reducing costs as well.
• Help with additional categories like Cloud Cost Management: TEM providers help the IT teams to have complete control over the cloud cost for an organization. The telecom expense management programs make it easier to allocate spend to the company department and projects correctly. This saves the IT teams from the headache of manually compiling cloud bills and invoices.

Who Can Benefit from TEM?

Modern technologies are fast-growing as businesses strive to be competitive in the game. The advent of IoT, 5G network, and other modern technologies will continue to lead to even more IT spending for most organizations.

More errors are likely to occur with more users on the platforms and the complexity of use. That is why manual processing is no longer a beneficial expense management method for your business.

So if you are an IT leader supporting a large network, an expense management tool is something you cannot operate without. As your company grows, you will see the need to automate the expense management systems as this leads to reduced lag time and improves customer service while reducing costs.

TEM solutions are great for your departments in processing thousands of invoices, reports, and IT asset inventories. You can outsource or use in-house telecom expense management.

Outsourcing TEM

There is a good reason for the rising trend in outsourcing telecommunications management. Instead of your current team, or hiring a team to build an in-house telecommunications platform, companies can save money by outsourcing these tasks. With TEM, outsourced telecommunications also lead to streamlined use and operations. The savings from Telecom Expense Management come in the form of lower fees and charges, limited unauthorized usage, and fewer billing errors. TEM can also help your company obtain credits and refunds from any overcharges.

In-house programs usually have manual procedures that include data entry and spreadsheets for fixed invoice management. These tasks take up a lot of time and resources, and anytime there is manual data entry, there is the possibility of human error. Human error is one of the main causes for disputes over poor inventory management, overcharges, invoicing, and fund recovery. A TEM system is automated and accurate. It boosts productivity, which allows the company to focus on its core business and drastically minimize demands on internal business resources.

Streamlined, accurate operations lead to more time for management to look at the bigger picture. TEM handles the details and day-to-day operations, and it provides reports and insights to management. The company can then use these operational insights for its strategic financial planning. With the expected growth in communications expenses, planning for these expenses is essential to future budget considerations. By successfully preparing, companies do not need to play catchup with costs, as they can allocate a budget for their future communications costs well before the time comes to implement it.

Telecom Expense Management with brightfin

If you’re currently running your telecom expense management program internally with manual methods like spreadsheets, you are likely investing too much time and resources to process and analyze invoices, dispute charges, recover funds, manage the inventory, and order new services and devices. Partnering with brightfin allows you to enhance productivity, reduce demands on your internal resources, and have more time to focus on innovation and driving revenue.

It’s important to make informed decisions when you are trying to control your business expenses. With brightfin, you cease to worry about the unconstrained growth of your telecom expenses.
You can quickly determine if you are getting value for your business and whether there are areas of optimization in the way you use your telecom services. Addressing these issues requires real visibility into your spend and our TEM solution provides you with this visibility.