Explore our TEM blogs for expert perspective, real examples, and clear guidance to manage telecom and technology expenses confidently, with fresh insights added routinely.
Who would have thought a flashlight could be so cool?Well, as long as it is an app that runs on a smart phone, the flashlight all of a sudden becomes current again. This seems to be the case with so many smart phone apps, that when looked at carefully, really just accomplish some traditional function using your phone.
When processing large and complex telecommunications invoices, there are often account level charges such as taxes and other fees that don’t relate to individual service items. Often organizations lump these charges into a special accounting bucket for lack of a better approach.
A simple, yet important part of any good TEM project, is to maintain detailed instructions and documentation to go with your telecom invoice processing efforts. Some invoices are more complex than others, and will require significant documentation, while some or so simple that they won’t require any documentation at all.
In these modern days of telecommuting, employees are increasingly performing business tasks remotely from their homes. Some of the activities can be significantly impeded by the lack of adequate upload speed.
I know this sounds like something your mother would tell you, but looking ahead and making good decisions in the present can lead to good things in the future. As 2010 starts to wind down in its fourth quarter, firms are making decisions about what to spend, and what NOT to spend, in 2011. Essentially, it’s budgeting time for many departments, and with IT costs set to rise with Windows 7 deployment, increasing security issues, and higher demands for wireless devices and data plans, finding ways to save money before you spend it is not a bad idea.
With this growing crowd of inexperienced TEM practitioners, it is more important than ever to consider how easy to understand and learn a TEM system is. Video games are a great place to start. After all, most video games are designed for a wide range of age levels and degrees of technology sophistication. Additionally, they are designed to be as intuitive as possible and easy to learn. This important for video game producers because it would be very hard to sell a video game that took too long to learn.
In addition to being a leader in telecom expense management, Valicom is also proud to be a 100% woman owned, women’s business enterprise (WBE), certified by WBENC through the Women’s Business Development Center(WBDC) of Chicago, and by NWBOC.
An integral component to any telecom audit is the tracking and validation of savings issues. As those involved perform the various pieces of the audit, it is vital that there is a centralized issue tracking mechanism in place.
In today’s economy, any way to trim fat from the bottom line is a welcome activity. As clinic and hospital professionals, the focus is often concentrated on the health care side of spending, not the technology end. But as technology needs become more and more complex, there can be great opportunity for savings through better management of telecommunication costs. Problems like overpayments, errors, or poor inventory tracking of your land lines, circuits, pagers, “smart” phones, and data plans could be wasting a lot of your annual budget.
As if the Internet, with all of its information, or non-information, and tools, widgets, etc wasn’t enough of a distraction… not to be outdone, the telecommunications industry (and more specifically, wireless telecommunications) has developed smart phones that come with full featured browsers and we can all now carry the full distractablity of the Internet in our pockets.
Think the Great Recession is over? Not for CIOs. For the second year running, business productivity and cost reduction was the No. 1 concern of CIOs, CTOs and IT executives in the annual CIO survey from the Society for Information Management — and by a wide margin, according to Jerry Luftman, who has conducted the survey for SIM for the past 10 years.
Working in the Telecom Expense Management world, it’s clear that data communications, and particularly wireless data communications, have been and will continue to be the dominant driver behind new technologies and new methods of sharing and working with information.
In our ongoing effort to bring best practices of telecom expense management to as many businesses as we can, Valicom will again be attending the WBENC Conference and Business Expo in Chicago September 22nd.
One of the classic TEM audit projects is determining if there are lines in your telecommunications spend that are no longer in use, but of course, still billing. A very direct and thorough method to accomplish this is test calls.
Soliciting feedback from customers, to gauge their level of satisfaction with your services, is an age old tradition in business. This deep desire for information drives everything from “Secret Shoppers” to the toll-free “Tell us how we’re doing?” number printed on the back of a receipt. For Valicom, it shows in our eleven year tradition of surveying clients quarterly, to learn how well we are delivering in eight key areas: professionalism, overall expectation, communication, quality and accuracy, understanding client needs, responsiveness, meeting deadlines, and overall value.
In the world of telecommunications, technology changes quickly. And so do people’s expectations. When I was in college, apartment complexes would brag of having a dedicated T1 for their building to provide Internet for their tenants. At the time, this seemed pretty awesome. Thinking back, nobody really new what a T1 was – we just knew it was fast.
Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS, can be easy-to-learn and simple-to-use, while still possessing robust capabilities. Through online training and client support teams, the user can expand their use of the tool as their knowledge increases. Upgrades are installed automatically as they are rolled out, usually at no additional charge. SaaS telecom expense management solutions can scale up or down with the users’ volume requirements.
One of the simplest functions performed as part of the TEM process, is paying the vendors for services. Many companies, tempted by sending fewer checks, will combine the payments for multiple telecom invoices on a single check, and provide a key to the telecom vendor so that they can apply the payments to correct accounts.
To be or not to be? That is the question… What Shakespeare was contemplating with this famous quote from Hamlet, was “Is it better to live or to die?” Can this same philosophy be contemplated with the use of software-as-a-solution, or “SaaS” technology? Well, while it is not a matter of life or death, mid-market companies have experienced numerous benefits to utilizing SaaS solutions to automate various functions within their organizations.
In an earlier blog dated July 20, 2010 entitled “What are Mid-Sized Organizations Doing About Controlling Telecom Expenses?,” we left you with the question: “What are the keys to telecom expense management (TEM) program success for small to mid-size businesses (SMBs)?”
