Whose TEM Solution Is This?

TEM has many parts, and the various stakeholders within your company may each only connect with a subset of the whole. The value lies in unifying the parts into a whole that meets the needs of all stakeholders.

It’s A Team Effort

Since no two companies are structured exactly alike, there will be differences in who is assigned responsibility for running the various processes contained within a TEM solution. But based on our experience, all of the following departments are typically holding a piece of the responsibility. Regardless of how your firm is organized, you can be sure that someone has been charged with the task of maximizing value in each of the areas shown on the chart.

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• Finance - CFOs know that every saved operating dollar is equal to boosting sales by 10 or more times that same amount. CFOs need a coherent picture of costs for budgeting and planning.
• Accounts Payable - A/P teams must handle thousands of invoices with short payment timeframes to control late fees, allocate costs accurately, and always be on the lookout for missing bills that could lead to unpaid accounts and service interruptions.
• Procurement and Legal – Improved contracts represent one of the largest potential areas of telecom savings. The difference between a world-class agreement and something less may be invisible to your company, but it can cost you plenty.
• Human Resources – Are your wireless devices still being managed by HR? If so, they may be struggling to maximize savings as well as control the proliferation of devices and related security issues.

Telecom And IT Takes The Lead

The #1 responsibility for telecom managers in today's highly connected world is to keep the network humming with 100% reliability. Yet they face continual added pressure to keep that network "up" while simultaneously driving its costs "down".

The most recognizable area of cost control is validating the accuracy of invoices, but without a true billing engineer on staff, how do the mountains of telecom bills get the scrutiny they require given the time it takes to do the job correctly? First you have to find the errors, then you have to correct them, then you have to make sure that vendors get it right the next time. It’s an endless cycle and a huge drain on resources. We have the expertise and efficiency to maximize your gain in this area.

Controlling costs also comes from knowing what you have, where it is, and how much it costs. As any telecom manager knows, it is a tremendous challenge to build and maintain an accurate inventory. It requires a monumental effort just to collect the data, which then needs to be verified, and moved into a database which provides reporting capability. Most companies do not have either an internal management tool, or the availability of properly trained people. We do.

A Multi Stakeholder Solution

Accounts Payable might be buying bill payment support, Procurement might be buying the knowledge to negotiate superior contracts, and Telecom might be buying bill validation and network management support, but in the end, those are all parts of the TEM, and we help companies understand the interrelationship of the various parts and why a unified solution provides maximum value.

Learn More: Are you considering CLECs as a TEM strategy?