Explore our TEM blogs for expert perspective, real examples, and clear guidance to manage telecom and technology expenses confidently, with fresh insights added routinely.
Well, it didn’t take long for the Google Mobile Wallet to cause a firestorm….PayPal has sued Google and two of its top execs, both former PayPal employees, for stealing trade secrets that helped the search company break into the multi-billion dollar mobile payments industry.
In another good example of increasing telecom complexity, your smartphone is now your credit card. Google is leading the pack in processing mobile payments, by unveiling the Google Wallet NFC (Near Field Communications) payments program in New York City on Thursday. In a nutshell, it means that the time has come where you can search for, swipe and buy items from your phone, without ever taking your credit card out of your pocket.
I had the excellent opportunity last week to mingle and meet with a number of our nation’s largest energy utilities at their annual EEI conference in Seattle. In addition to drinking great Washington wines, and enjoying the seasonal Copper River salmon that had just come in, I learned a great deal about the challenges of taking our energy system into the future. Implementation of “smart grid” technology, the pressures to upgrade and expand energy delivery infrastructure, and the looming issue involved with a nation full of “plugged-in” electric cars mean that the industry is facing a variety of expenses and pressures.
As if technology hadn’t been moving fast enough, a group at Queen’s University in Canada has created the first smartphone you can bend.The so-called PaperPhone is a only a prototype right now, but its creator, Roel Vertegaal, believes the device, and flexible display technologies in general, will become commonplace in the future.
As telecom grows in complexity, managing wireless and telecom costs becomes ever more difficult, while still being a critical way to control business expenses. New web-based software tools have entered the market that make managing telecom expenses easier, faster and more cost-effective.
Last but not least in our posts on telecom expense management tasks made easier with TEM software., we’re going to cover reporting. Granted, this is not an exhaustive list of tasks, by any means, but it’s a good start. You can go back and see what we had to say about inventorymanagement, cost allocation, telecom contracts, telecom invoice management, order & change management and issue tracking. And now for your reading pleasure….
After discussing how telecom expense management software can assist with order & change management, we need to talk about issue tracking. Granted, we’re sure YOU never have problems with your telecom vendors/inventory/lines/devices/users/credits etc, but you know, some people do. And it’s a pain to manage.
If you’re not sick of it yet, we continue in our overview of telecom expense management tasks that can be streamlined with a good TEM software, we’ve covered inventorymanagement, cost allocation, telecom contracts and telecom invoice management. Another challenging thing to keep track of is….
Speaking of document management, one of the biggest pain points of telecom has got to be invoices. Little missiles of irritation that arrive in the mail to ruin your day. Sometimes by the boxful. And you knowyou should really look at all of those – line by line, every single month – to make sure they are accurate. But really, who has the time?
As we’ve been discussing ways to make your life easier and save you time, document management comes to mind. In the modern era, no one wants a file cabinet stuffed full of papers hulking in the corner of their office. And they certainly don’t want to have to dig through it to find contract information. A contract should be electronic, easy to find, and cross-referenced with the items it pertains to.
Another telecom management task that will conjure up memories of your Mother, or maybe your Father, is the age old question – “Who is going to pay for this thing?” Now that you know what you have, your CFO probably wants to know who is responsible for each particular business expense. Those Accountants, always so picky. But that is what you pay bean counters to do – count beans. And sometimes they even want the beans split into pieces! It is not uncommon to have one inventory item being paid for by multiple departments.
Sometimes it doesn’t hurt to remind ourselves that thefancy technology we are surrounded by doesn’t just dissipate at the end of its lifecycle. It has to go *somewhere* and it is greatly preferable that the somewhere be a recycling center than a landfill. So with Earth Day coming up this weekend, the continued success of Wisconsin’s e-cycling law is a welcome bit of news. If your state doesn’t offer convenient e-cycling, a quick Google search will turn up a number of organizations that can help you setup a good cell phone recycling program.
Now that we’ve discussed what TEM is and why you need it, and gone over the power of a SaaS telecom expense management application, we’ll walk through the tasks you can manage to help control your telecom costs. And we’ll start with:Telecom Inventory Management
Madison, WI (April 19, 2011) – Certified woman-owned telecom expense management software and telecom auditing firm Valicom is proud to be honored as part of DiversityBusiness.com’s 11th Annual Business Awards. Each year DiversityBusiness.com collects and compiles their ‘Top Business List’ on a State and National basis. The data is used to determine the most successful woman and minority owned entrepreneurs across the United States for their awards program.
A challenge facing the telecom expense management channel is the increased sophistication of our clients. And mind you, a “challenge” is not a “problem”. Having a better educated, more informed marketplace has always been a goal at Valicom, as we feel the more we all know, the better we can serve each other and our end user customers.
To conduct business today, we know you need tools and you need technology. This means telephones, mobile phones, pagers, expensive high-speed internet connections, laptops with wireless capabilties, the list goes on and on. And, over time, the list not only gets longer as new gadgets hit the market, but the number of people within your organization who needs these things goes up. All of that leads to complexity, and complexity can lead to errors.
Essentially, it is an all encompassing term that refers to the overall monitoring and handling of wireless, voice, and data assets for your company. This is a process you can do yourself, via a web-based platform like Clearview, or you can partner with a firm like Valicom to do these services for you. Whoever does it, in plain language, it means gathering all of your telecom bills and looking for overcharges through a telecom audit, searching for contract violations, finding ways to save money, and negotiating directly with vendors to get a better deal.
The faltering Blackberry maker RIM (Research in Motion) has thrown their hat in the tablet ring with the release of their new Playbook. As more firms and individuals move away from the recently ubiquitous “Crackberry” for business use, the addition of a tablet to their product stable is a move intended to keep RIM relevant in the market. But will it work?
Not that I have one, mind you, because personally I’m rather cheap. But if I did have an original iPad, I’d probably be pretty grumpy right now as the new ones came out at the same price point as the one you might have purchased at Best Buy the day before.
Data provides the basis for Telecom and IT professionals to “make better decisions faster”. When I managed data centers and telecom activities in the past, management usually looked at the IT and telecom function as a necessary evil and an overhead department that detracts from the bottom line profits. IT and telecom can always find something to spend money on. New computers, servers, wireless devices, infrastructure upgrades, etc. Some companies treat these functions as enabling their profits and allowing them to grow through technology.
The HFMA newsletter had a great article calling out the need for wireless expense management in its latest issue. This is a challenge we see as well, with our healthcare clients. Industry stats show that healthcare spending on telecommunications is expected to increase by 44 percent over the next three years, approaching a cost of $12.4 billion by 2013. As newer and faster smartphones and tablets hit the market, monthly fees and data plans increase, and vendors merge and maneuver, the complexity of managing wireless gets harder every year.
