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As we approach 2024, businesses are facing an ever-evolving technological landscape. With innovations constantly emerging and integrating various platforms and tools becoming a standard operating procedure, managing technology expenses is more challenging than ever. Enter the realm of Technology Expense Management (TEM) companies, which offer specialized solutions to navigate this complex terrain. For forward-thinking firms, acquiring a TEM company can yield significant advantages.
In order to run a successful business, it is imperative that you have a well-oiled machine i.e., an effective and efficient IT infrastructure. If your tech processes are not streamlined, your business may fall behind the competition, resulting in a loss in revenue. In this blog post, we’ve discussed how to manage your tech infrastructure and achieve operational excellence.
Being a business owner is not an easy role. The success of your organization relies on the decisions you make, especially when it directly affects your financial outlook. From the small investments, like whether or not to provide a coffee maker in the break room, to the larger commitments, such as whether or not to expand office space, the pressure is on you to cultivate a thriving operation.
There are always more numbers to crunch. In IT, particularly, you always have to weigh the costs of upgrades against expected returns. We always want new tech to pay for itself several times over, but that won’t happen unless upgrades are made with excellent direction. Usually, the biggest problem with new tech is that it is encumbered by old systems. All too often, upgrade plans overlook cabling infrastructure, and that gets expensive.
According to a recent Gartner survey, the average reduction of total cost of ownership (TCO) is 13 percent when deploying telecom expense management (TEM). Of the respondents, 40 percent reported a TCO reduction of 10 to 20 percent. 36 percent of the enterprises reported a reduction of 10 percent or less.
Most enterprises would agree that the benefits of TEM are very evident. Some of these advantages include improved business process outcomes, extended scale and geo scope, and better visibility. However, TEM is not without its disadvantages, which include hidden costs and the extra time needed for implementation. In general, customers choose TEM providers based on scalability, TCO reduction, and expected performance. Unfortunately, the disadvantages of TEM cause TCO reduction to be lower than it otherwise would be.
Based on the Gartner report, here is some information about how enterprise TEM challenges drive customer acquisition.
Redundant lines, carrier overcharges and a myriad of other issues crop up in the course of managing a company's telecom costs. It's one area where there's always money that can be saved if you have the time and manpower to track it down. Many companies don't. Here are a few big-ticket items to keep an eye on if you want to save money, and it won't take you months to realize savings.
Quantum is a powerful buzzword these days. Quantum computers have so much hype behind them that marketing teams have started adding the word to ordinary objects in an attempt to make them sound more powerful. Despite the frenzy, there’s a reason for excitement around quantum computers. While they are far from being perfect, they do exist in the world today, and you need to get a grasp on them to stay above water as this technology shatters everything we know about computers.
Telecom Expense Management; a necessary requirement in the quest to achieve strategic cost reduction. Regardless of the size of the company, all businesses are always looking for ways to understand, validate, control and reduce business expenses. Companies that recognize the need for telecom expense control can choose between the following methods:
While hosting our summer webinar we gained some insight into our audience’s telecom challenges. To help the attendees learn from their peers, and to keep them awake, we offered a few poll questions with interesting results….
The first question asked what they found their biggest telecom management challenge to be. I was curious to see where the main pain points fell among the usual culprits – telecom inventory management, wireless device and plan control, telecom invoice auditing and processing, issue tracking and credit recovery or vendor management.
75% of the attendees said telecom invoice auditing and processing was their biggest hurdle. Based on what our clients come to us for, I would probably concur with that. The piles of paper and the expertise to know what to look for while auditing, are both challenging.
The next biggest response was telecom inventory management. Knowing WHAT you have is half the battle. At least if your inventory is accurate you can sort of tell what you should be paying for, and we spend a lot of time organizing and updating inventories for our clients. Clearview, our telecom expense management software, is great for helping with that.
Feel free to read more if you’re interested in knowing how Valicom can help you with telecom invoice auditing or telecom invoice processing. We can also offer a hand with telecom inventory management. And you can always use Clearview – our TEM software – to manage it in house. Tomorrow I’ll talk about another interesting poll question we did on telecom RFPs.
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.
During a recent AberdeenGroup telecom expense management webinar sponsored by Valicom on the topic of SaaS TEM Solutions for the mid-market, there was an informal poll conducted with 75 mid-market attendees around the question “What is your current approach to managing telecom expenses?” The results of the responses are shown in the graph below:
