Telecom Expense Management Solutions: Simplify SIM Management and Reduce Your Data Costs for Your Mobile Fleet
What is a telecom expense management solution?
Telecom expense management (TEM) services provide enterprises’ IT, procurement, and finance departments with the ability to order, provision, support, and manage costs of corporate communications and associated IT services with their mobile devices.
With the rise of mobile workers and the solutions to support their day-to-day work, businesses find they must support more and more mobile devices that need an internet connection. IT departments supporting these workers on the go or those without a WiFi connection must manage the use of cellular networks across multiple vendors, all of whom have complex and varied billing methodologies. Managing usage spending is a major challenge. For example, one of the toughest administrative issues facing staff responsible for telecom usage and allocation is unified billing. What a nightmare!
As an IT managed service provider, DecisionPoint has seen it all when it comes to telecom expense management (TEM). Read on to learn about tips and solutions for simplifying TEM for your business.
Look for a solution that provides flexible management options to tackle any telecom need
If you need to support mobile workers all over the country, you likely need to manage multiple carriers. One carrier is dominant in the West, and one is dominant in the east. No one seems to cover Nebraska well. It’s a complicated patchwork of coverage maps. Plus, multiple carriers mean multiple bills! Understanding multiple bills and managing usage to avoid overage costs across carriers is a manual and time-consuming process without telecom expense management services. Unfortunately, traditional TEM services only focus on aggregating your bills to simplify payment. They have no incentive to drive costs out of your business. Using a holistic solution for TEM simplifies your billing and optimizes your spend.
A true (and useful) telecom expense management solution is a carrier agnostic tool that will manage your footprint through a single pane of glass. It will provide you with a complete real-time view of your devices, the carriers and help you perform the following mission-critical functions.
- View upload/download usage by day or month
- See how many connections are using each calling plan
- Easily identify and act on the highest data users
- View SIM connection totals by day or month
- Get real-time current cycle charges on a call plan level
One size does not fit all! Your telecom expense management services should accommodate varying data consumption among users
A mobile worker’s data usage can change from day-to-day and location-to-location. A heavy user of data may need an expensive unlimited data package one day in one location and a smaller data bundle the next in another location. Look for a tool that can help you provide the right amount of data to the right staff so that you are only paying for what you need. The right solution will allow you to manage a centralized “pool” of bandwidth across your entire user base in real-time. The ability to pool minutes and share that data across your network is a powerful solution that can solve a myriad of problems. Finding the right partner to manage that for you will help your company save on your telecom bill and ensure the best service possible for your mobile workers. With a TEM solution, you’ll never receive a surprise overage bill again.
But that’s not all. Management of usage across users must include the ability to add and subtract lines of service. It’s a hassle dealing with the carriers! No one wants to fight that battle every time there is a change in employee headcount. It’s common for an employee to leave and the business forgets to cancel the line, or the telecom provider simply errors and doesn’t cancel the line. The result? A lot of wasted time and money trying to ensure you are using what you are paying for and not getting overbilled. Adding a new line can be equally challenging. Getting the SIM activated and the phone delivered at the right place and time can be brutal. When you must work across multiple carriers, the headaches are amplified when adding and subtracting lines.
A telecom expense management service with complete visibility and simplified management of billing is critical. Period.
What’s the point of a telecom expense management solution if it doesn’t save you money? Traditional telecom expense management services only focus on aggregating your bills to simplify the payment process. At DecisionPoint, we know that doesn’t cut it. A TEM should enable your business to control and minimize telecom expenses at a granular level. The right telecom expense management service allows your business to:
- Access invoices that simply and accurately explain monthly charges
- Allow for Excel Spreadsheet exports for easy custom calculations and analysis
- Provide breakdowns by customizable labels and groups
- Remove the guesswork to understanding your telecom expenses
A telecom expense management solution should lower your management time and expense of critical connectivity.
The right TEM solution will allow your business to save time and money while improving your mobile work’s access to cellular networks. The following are critical components any TEM solution should improve for your organization.
- Activate, suspend, or terminate SIM card subscriptions quickly and easily
- Troubleshoot data connections
- Change data plans on a single connection or a batch of connections
- Identify heavy users to reduce or eliminate overage fees
DecisionPoint’s telecom expense management experts can help you manage these critical needs. From end-to-end managed services to an a’ la carte solution that fits the unique needs of your business, DecisionPoint is your partner for better telecom expense management at the lowest possible cost.
Have a project you’d like to talk about? Contact DecisionPoint today.
