TEM Business Case

Building a Business Case for Telecom Expense Management

If you are leading a process improvement initiative at your organization, Cass can help with the steps of building a business case for telecom expense management. Some of the conditions that will impact your business case include:

Contract management – How do you negotiate and enforce contracts now? How do you ensure you are paying the rates and getting the discounts that you negotiated? Can you receive automatic notification of expiration or renewal dates? Can you store contract-related documents and notes in a database to help you prepare for contract negotiations?

Change management – What is the rate of change for events like store or branch re-locations, data center moves, staffing changes, and telecom technology upgrades? What systematic processes are used today to manage change, including centralized provisioning and inventory management?

Network complexity – Do you have a large number of locations, circuits or wireless lines in today’s network?

Use of existing TEM software or services – How long have you been with your current provider or software, and are best-in-class technologies and processes being employed?

IT and telecom management efficiencies – How many people are involved in TEM – or invoice processing, bill auditing, change and inventory management, and spend management – today? Do they have the right training and automation tools to manage these increasingly complex processes? Given other job responsibilities, do they have enough time to maintain circuit inventory, identify overcharges, track down refunds and make process improvements without additional resources and tools?

Business efficiencies associated with timely payments – Do you regularly incur late fees due to slow invoice processing? (Do you have an accurate means of measuring late fees?) Have you incurred loss of service due to late invoice payments?

Other business efficiencies – How much time is spent via manual methods and spreadsheets to report telecom expenses, such as employee wireless costs? How much time is spent in HR and in the business units on approving, procuring and reviewing telecom invoices and wireless usage and equipment upgrades and replacements?

Accounts payable efficiencies – How many people are involved in processing and paying invoices? How much time is spent communicating with IT and others in the process? Are telecom charges being allocated satisfactorily? Are manual processes in place to allocate charges and process invoices?

Cass Can Help You Build Your Case for TEM

If time is short or you are struggling in any of the above areas, Cass can help. We've worked with many organizations to help clarify business goals and projected their expected returns. The ROI – which varies from organization to organization – usually comes from substantial improvements such as effective invoice audits, improved usage management and effective contract management. Organizations decide to what degree headcount reduction or redeployment is a factor in developing ROI targets. Very often organizations are already operating with lean IT infrastructure teams, and a compelling ROI is based on gaining efficiencies unrelated to staffing.

For more information, contact the Cass Telecom group today.