Within the world of telecom expense management (TEM), the term provisioning activity refers to any order for a move, an add, a change or a disconnection of carrier service. Often referred to as MACDs, these activities optimize the inventory environment, ensuring necessary resources are active while disconnecting those not in use.
Benefits of Tracking MACDs
Tracking and recording MACDs provides a clear, up-to-date snapshot of your telecom environment. This insight can be leveraged to provide a number of key advantages, such as:
- The ability to generate cost-savings by only paying for services that are in use
- The potential to significantly reduce the risk of disruption caused by an unoptimized telecoms inventory
- An opportunity to better align infrastructure management with strategic objectives
By actively tracking provisioning activities as they occur and updating the telecom inventory so that it accurately reflects the current telecom environment, organizations can significantly reduce risks and control costs. However, the processes involved in tracking MACDs are complex and can conjure up a number of challenges.
Challenges of Tracking MACDs
In the modern-day enterprise, not only do businesses need to track MACDs for fixed telecoms, IT infrastructure, and mobile devices but, increasingly, they are handling employee-owned devices as part of a BYOD program. This added intricacy can be overwhelming for internal teams, who lack in-depth telecom knowledge, and can give rise to costly oversights – which often go unnoticed, even when repeated month after month.
To further add to the confusion, the processes involved for tracking MACDs often differ depending on their function. For instance, during the process of completing add orders, executive-level authentication is almost always required for the approval and provisioning of new infrastructure. To complete move and change orders, the geographic location of infrastructure, as well as its status, must be known. To complete a disconnect, the status change must be reflected in the telecoms inventory. And, the process of tracking provisioning activities for mobile devices is even more elaborate.
Analyzing, following, and recording this information is virtually impossible without the right software, yet, all too frequently, large organizations choose to keep track of telecom provisioning activity using just spreadsheets. Not only are spreadsheets confusing and difficult to interpret, they are also not designed to store historical data, so, often, in an attempt to keep things manageable and updated, staff will overwrite key facets of information.
This makes locating the right information and updating the telecoms inventory unmanageable, and makes it harder to locate invoice irregularities within the data.
A Solution to Tracking MACDs
To effectively track orders throughout their entire lifecycle, ensuring that MACD requests are fulfilled on schedule and invoices are accurate, enterprises must keep a close eye on telecom MACD activity as part of a wider TEM solution.
Cass Telecom places a core focus on tracking provisioning activities within its wider telecom expense management program. Cass ensures that telecom inventory is automatically updated, adding clarity to an organization's overall network environment, and verifies that invoice payments are correct, to avoid overpayments and remove the risk of disruption.
To learn how Cass was able to save a beauty retailer millions by effectively managing MACDs - read our case study
