Clearview Today
Before we dive into the evolution of our in-house solution, let’s take a look at what it looks like today. Clearview can be used by internal staff alone, or paired with professional services provided by our expert team, our technology is a robust proactive tool that increases visibility, controls costs, and reduces risk.
Clearview has received excellent reviews for Telecom Expense Management Software on various software review websites and our services rank, on average, 3.9 out of 4 stars, by our clients. Okay, enough sales talk… Let’s talk about what all Clearview includes.
Services:
Cloud Expense Management: cloud expenses should be tracked and reviewed with sophisticated reporting that manual systems don’t provide.
Contract Management: Telecom carriers are in business to make money and since most contracts are for several years, they can take more of it than they should.
Invoice Management and Payment: Managing and monitoring your invoices are critical in telecom and technology expense management.
IT Inventory Management: At the core of telecom expense management is maintaining a detailed, up-to-date telecom and IT asset inventory.
Telecom Expense Management: Telecom is one of the top five corporate expenses and is an area that’s right with over-payment.
Utility Bill Management: Working with a utility invoice management service immediately cuts your administrative cost by 30%.
Now that you have a better understanding of Clearview does today, I will tell you about my Founding story and the experiences I had creating this technology from the ground up.
Cleaview’s Beginnings
Clearview looks very different today than it did 30 years ago. When I started the business in 1991, my office tools consisted of an Intel 10286 computer (100Mbps memory) which was a second-generation home (user friendly) computer, and word processing and spreadsheet (Excel) software. I used spreadsheets extensively to calculate pricing and perform long distance vendor cost comparisons based on the pricing schedules offered by AT&T and several other alternative carriers who had entered the marketplace after divestiture.
Twelve months after I started Valicom,
I secured a loan from Oregon Community Bank and purchased a scanner, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and carrier rating software to automate the process. With this technology, telecom invoices were scanned, the OCR software converted the scanned image to text/numerical characters and the rating software applied the various carrier rate schedules on a call detail level. The end result was a summary spreadsheet showing the number of minutes used in each rate category, the cost for each long-distance carrier and the savings the client could achieve for each alternative plan.
The problem with this process, at that time, was that the OCR software had a very low level of accuracy and we spent quite a bit of time, reviewing and correcting scanning errors. Because of this, several months after implementing the process, we discontinued the process and went back to doing manual long-distance analyses using spreadsheets.
In the first five years of business,
we continued to keep our ears to the ground and listened to marketplace needs. We discovered that there were quite a few errors and overcharges in carrier bills. Based on that, we began offering invoice auditing services. In addition, there were several changes that were occurring and new technology that was being introduced in the industry. Mobile became mainstream in the marketplace and the use of the internet was becoming more widespread. In addition, we listened to our clients and heard the need in the marketplace for assistance in providing more accurate cost allocation and payment of telecom and mobile bills.
In 1996,
my husband Paul joined the company as an IT developer. He developed our first generation TEM technology, Inview, in an Access database to assist us in organizing telecom and mobile information, providing more services and bringing greater visibility to client’s expenses through our reporting platform. This platform housed all of our client’s telecom and mobile invoice information and provided inventory, cost allocation and bill payment reports.
In 2001,
due to the technology limitations of the Access platform, we ported all of our client invoice information from InView to a SQL database. This allowed us greater functionality, increased automation of processes and a much more robust reporting tool.
Up until 2010,
InView was an in-house tool and could only be accessed by our internal operations staff. Our clients wanted to be able to have access to our technology to perform their own telecom expense management processes and access their customized reporting on-line. In order to address these needs, our 3rd generation SaaS platform, Clearview, was born. This on-line technology continued to evolve providing cost savings, greater efficiencies and increased visibility to our clients’ telecom and mobile assets and expenses.
Today,
Clearview is a web-based telecom and wireless management software tool to help our clients increase productivity while managing wireless, wireline and inventory in one intuitive location. Valicom is proud to include two extremely talented, full-time developers that continuously update and enhance Clearview. We are please to have the opportunity to refresh the design to an updated user interface with smooth design that is due to release January 1st, 2021!
If you would like to learn more about Valicom or the services we provide, please email us at sales@valicomcorp.com or call 608.274.3515.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: NANCY PECKHAM
Nancy began her career in telecommunications in 1983 as an account executive with Republic Telecom, a regional long distance carrier. She was named district sales manager for the Wisconsin region in 1987 when Republic Telecom was acquired by Mid American Communications. She recognized a need for independent, objective telecommunications consulting which led her founding Valicom. Since its launch in 1991, Valicom has been a leader in providing telecom expense management solutions and serves enterprise and mid-market clients in a variety of industries and verticals across the U.S. Nancy earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, founded and served as president of the Telecommunications Professionals of Wisconsin (TPW) from 1989-1992, and was executive vice president on