Telecom Expense Management For Enterprises

TEM for Enterprises

Enterprises now implement Telecom Expense Management programs worldwide

Gone are the days of manageable telecommunications services for enterprises.
Today, businesses employ an overwhelming array of communications services, from traditional voice to data to wireless services to VoIP.
For most companies, these services are not the major focus of their business.
They do not generate revenue and instead are a major cost center. Yet, they support the mission-critical operations that allow enterprises to conduct their business.

An Aberdeen Group report by analyst Christa Degnan estimates that the average Fortune 500 company spends about $116 million on telecommunications services each year.
The average mid-market company weighs in at $26 million per year. Aberdeen suggests that errors account for between 7 and 12 percent of what enterprises spend on telecommunications. For large enterprises, the leakage associated with telecommunications services can translate into a loss of $8 million a year.

• Global companies are the most advanced in the implementation of TEM initiatives.
• Large National companies due to the multisite environment they have are adopting TEM now rapidly.
• MidMarket companies buy into TEM to tackle the increased complexity of necessary telecom services to run their business.

Telecom operators have little incentive to clean house on their end. Providers are happy to credit a disputed charge, but they seemingly do little to try to decrease their mistakes.
Billing errors can result for any number of reasons: billing system conversions, mergers and acquisitions, poorly written business rules that introduce errors.

On the enterprise side, there are simply too many bills that are too large and too complex for businesses to track and understand. Add to that a continuous amount of moves, adds and changes, and following the maze of services is a horrendous task.
A Fortune 500 company might process more than 15,000 telecom related bills per year, Aberdeen asserts, or 3,000 for a mid-market business.

Companies just cannot keep up with the volume, let alone perform detailed scrutiny for errors manually.
Manually auditing telecom-related bills is crippling enterprise ICT and accounting departments, which separately grapple with the nightmare inventory and invoice problems.

Within most enterprises, about 85 percent of telecom bills are not audited, but instead are paid in full, according to Aberdeen.
Those that are audited are only done so in part. As services become more complex, grow dramatically in volume and increase in complexity with the mobile workforce and next-generation services, the risk of exposure only stands to increase.

Enterprises now move beyond professional services to software modules for managing enterprise telecom expenses.

The software tracks telecom service information, including billing, order management, provisioning and inventory.
Enterprises are seeking more than just one-off audits of telecom bills. Instead, they want to develop a long-term plan to track services and close leakage loopholes.
Many enterprises struggle with tracking wireless expenses and inventory as well as reconciling what virtual and physical inventory is actually used versus what is billed.
To track an enterprise's physical and virtual inventory, telecom expense management matches it against a company's contracts, using an automated process to make sure that what the company is being charged matches the contracted rate for equipment and services. This automated process also automates moves, adds and changes.

Enterprises now implement Telecom Expense Management programs worldwide.

Convergence has the concept, technology and experience to make an enterprise TEM project work.