Ever wondered what makes the perfect recipe for optimizing your technology expense management? Here’s how we do it. Follow these step by step instructions for just the right mix of “take-a-load-off” and “big-cash-savings”.
With every good recipe, is a story. This formula was developed over 28 years ago when Valicom’s founder, Nancy Peckham, saw a need in the market place while she was working for an alternative long-distance carrier called Mid-American. At this time, the development of long-distance carriers was fairly new and was creating a lot of confusion. Buyers felt they were not getting the cost savings they were promised and wanted an independent consultant to help them choose the best carrier.
After years of experience, adjustment, and application, Valicom has created a recipe that works! Let’s take a look at the science behind each step of this delicious master piece and why each is so important.
1. Organize Your Cooking Tools for an Optimized Telecom Environment
First, we become aware of what we have in our inventory environment by organizing all of your cooking tools, making sure we know what we have and how often we use these items. Your telecom and technology expense management (TEM) environment is structured by the inventory held by your many employees and locations, so get out your pans, trays, spatulas and mixing bowls and let’s get started!
Knowing what tools you have is the first step in perfecting the recipe for telecom expense management success. Here are a few tools that companies should be tracking:
Software licenses
Hardware
Digital assets
Along with the physical items that are managed, companies need to also be tracking:
Capacity
Availability
Chargebacks
Once you organize the tools that you need to be tracking, you can begin eliminating assets that are hurting your bottom line.
2. Toss Any Outdated and Un-Needed Ingredients
Having unneeded ingredients in the form of devices can cost you. For example, Valicom works with one of the largest hospitality companies in the world. They came to Valicom seeking a WAN audit. They weren’t currently tracking their WAN inventory across their thousands of locations.
The first priority was a complete review of existing contracts followed by the creation of an itemized inventory with existing costs deployed at each of their locations. Utilizing invoice and web portal access, Valicom...
quickly developed a detailed inventory
conducted a comprehensive billing audit
and reviewed existing contracts for compliance
By doing this, Valicom discovered that this client had large data VPN connections that were still active in their old data center. By making this identification and taking the appropriate actions, Valicom alleviated $35,769.44 in monthly billing!
As you can see, this step is very important.
3. Mix Together Ingredients & Bake Away!
Now, this next step may be the most important part of the baking processes, mixing your ingredients together and throwing them in an oven at 325 degrees. In the TEM world, this is equivalent to uploading your telecom invoices into your SaaS tool to see what errors and discrepancies are present.
Here are a few examples of the type of errors you could find in your telecom invoice:
4. Serve and Enjoy - Errors Spotted, Time and Money Saved!
Within Valicom’s TEM software, you will be able to identify savings almost immediately. Our clients will tell you that after adding TEM to their daily resources, they’ve seen an immediate return on investment.
A healthcare client of ours, with seven hospitals, numerous clinics, and over 6,800 employees, originally came to Valicom needing assistance reviewing and processing invoices.
Valicom realized an almost immediate ROI and has been carrying on the relationship to this day. As of January 2017, we are pleased to release a total six-year savings of $684,030 for this client.
A quick recap of our step by step process to a delicious amount of savings includes identifying all tools in your inventory environment, dumping unneeded assets that are negatively affecting your bottom line, mixing your technology invoices into our TEM tool, Clearview, and happily watching the savings surface.
We often see that companies are still trying to manage these expenses in excel spreadsheets, wasting time and leaving room for mistakes. If your in-house efforts aren't leading to the time and money savings you would like to see, this sounds like the dish for you!
What are you waiting for? Let’s get started!
Request a FREE cost-savings analysis with our TEM experts!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: BRITTANY PECKHAM
Brittany grew up in Oregon, Wisconsin and graduated from the University of Wisconsin Business School with a Bachelor’s degree in Management and Human Resources with an emphasis in entrepreneurship. Brittany has been working with Valicom for 5+ years creating content for the TEM industry to deliver the many benefits users and organizations can experience in utilizing TEM services. With a passion for social media marketing, Brittany enjoys applying creativity throughout in various areas of her life while expressing creativity in everything she does and loves being consumed in projects, from start to finish.