The progression of an ever-more digital world is reinventing corporate strategies across entire industries. Technology is accelerating business practices all the time, and access to accurate data is now at the heart of enterprise performance.
To remain competitive in the information age, today's organizations must have a continuous understanding of what assets they have, where they are, what they do, and how much they cost. This holds true across all business sectors, but, for telecom services specifically, labyrinthine within enterprise environments, it's even more significant.
Telecom expense audits provide organizations with the opportunity to gain this insight. While the value of an annual telecom audit is well established, a continuous audit seeks to go even further and include every possible invoice line-item charge as they're received. Here are seven key reasons why this approach is superior.
1. Enhances Enterprise Visibility
Visibility is a core issue among enterprise organizations. The telecom environment is vast, complex, and intricate, composed of IT infrastructure, fixed and, for organizations with a BYOD policy, employee-owned hardware.
When enterprises perform sporadic audits, they gain visibility of all their telecom assets in every location across the world. But as infrastructure is moved, added, changed, and disconnected (MACDs), this visibility is quickly lost.
Continuous audits, in contrast, don’t suffer from such short-lived lifecycles. If enterprises perform audits on a regular basis, they maintain their visibility over all aspects of their physical inventory, and simplify their view of the telecom ecosystem.
2. Generates Greater Cost-Savings
Traditional telecom audits can be hugely beneficial. Providing enterprise organizations with the opportunity to identify underused or unused infrastructure, audits can be used as a blueprint through which to optimize the telecom environment and generate cost-savings.
However, within large enterprise organizations, the optimization of the telecom environment is often short-lived, and, as MACDs occur, the environment can shift dramatically. The value of continuous auditing is that it ensures the telecom environment is accurate at all times, this mitigates the slip in service efficiency, ensures assets are never unused, and maximizes the cost-saving capabilities of the enterprise.
3. Minimizes Disruption
The conventional annual auditing process can be a disruptive experience. The task of auditing numerous assets, in multiple locations, across various countries, just once a year is a mammoth undertaking. Not only is this process very time-consuming but it can detract from employee’s core responsibilities, meaning productivity also suffers.
Continuous audits, by comparison, are not nearly as intrusive. By performing telecom audits frequently, the time taken to produce actionable results is far less, and the disruption caused is reduced significantly. This enables employees to continue focusing on their core responsibilities – ensuring productivity remains constant.
4. Increases Audit and Reporting Flexibility
The flexibility offered by a continuous audit allows auditing practices to be adapted around an enterprise's day-to-day needs. Audits can be conducted to either coincide with other projects or be moved to avoid disrupting large meetings or campaigns. In addition, flexibility in reporting helps the company produce reports that serve internal purposes. These reports can be customized to present thorough and detailed breakdowns of transactional data, something which is usually not possible within traditional audit reports.
5. Boosts Audit Accuracy
As outlined above, conventional auditing is a herculean feat that drains resources, causes disruption and impacts productivity across the entire enterprise. But not only that – due to the sheer massiveness of the job, accuracy can also suffer.
A commonly accepted psychology principle is that the size and complexity of a task has a direct correlation on the degree of human error made when the task is performed. With a painstakingly time-consuming and mundane task such as an annual audit, the quantity of human error is increased yet further.
Reducing the time-frame between audits by choosing to perform them continually means that a single audit is smaller and auditors will be better versed in the practices needed to undertake one. With less to audit each time and greater experience, human error is reduced, and accuracy is increased.
6. Unlocks Trends and Patterns
Another significant benefit of continuous auditing – in contrast to sporadic auditing – is the ability to generate customized reports to identify trends and patterns. Utilizing only annual auditing processes, organizations may take several years to uncover recurring trends that consistently impact spend, such as missed payments after a location closure. But by performing audits on a continuous basis, patterns can be spotted far sooner, helping enterprises to generate additional cost-savings.
7. Improves Network Security
Enterprise network security has never been more important. Cyber-attacks pose a significant threat to organizations, monetarily and reputationally, and recent high-profile data breaches have significantly increased scrutiny from legislators and compliance organizations.
The practice of performing a telecom audit enables companies to understand what devices are connected to the network and determine whether they pose a threat to the integrity of the organization.
While annual auditing can aid in the identification and removal of these potential threats, it's severely limited by being just once a year. However, by performing audits continually, organizations can cleanse the network far more regularly, substantially minimizing the threat of breaches and also demonstrating their efforts to regulators.
The Value of Continuous Telecom Audits
Continuous telecom expense audits offer enterprises an opportunity to manage their telecom estate better. While baseline telecom audits can be beneficial, the full advantages of an audit are only really felt when they’re performed on an ongoing basis.
Here at Cass, continuous audits are included as standard within our TEM offering. Our expert teams review billing records, contracts, tariffs and inventories by location, removing the telecom burden and generating cost-savings year after year.
Learn more about today’s telecom expense management landscape with the help of Gartner. Their independent analysis of the market is an invaluable source for IT and finance professionals. Download your copy of the 2023 Gartner® Market Guide for Telecom Expense Management Services today.
Topics: Expense Audit
