What is Telecom Expense Management?

5 June 2017 | Posted by Cass Information Systems, Inc.

Telecom Expense Management (TEM) not only helps a business cut immediate costs, but, when delivered as an effective service, it can greatly streamline processes to free up valuable staff time and continue to deliver savings year on year.

Every organization needs telecoms infrastructure, but sourcing, evaluating and negotiating services and contracts is time consuming and often tedious.

And that's just the beginning. Once telecom and software contracts are in place and running, organizations must deal with the monthly influx of carrier service invoices – each one complex and potentially mired in error. 

Telecom Expense Management

At its most basic, TEM is all about consolidating, managing, and optimizing the telecoms environment to reduce costs and minimize risk. It aims to maximize resource availability, streamline business processes and identify and eradicate inefficiencies.  

Download your complimentary copy of the 2023 Gartner Market Guide for Telecom  Expense Management Services.

Why is TEM Needed?

At the enterprise-level, the telecoms environment becomes incredibly vast, intricate, and complex.

Today’s businesses are managing fixed telecoms and IT infrastructure, mobile devices, and, increasingly, employee-owned equipment via Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) programs. 

Communications and software spend tends to be arranged via complicated rate-structures and requires multi-year commitments for various, disparate services. Not only is this awkward to track and bureaucracy-heavy, but mistakes are common – and far too often go unnoticed, even as they are repeated month after month. Even when errors or over-charges are small, they can quickly add up to vast sums – all spent on absolutely nothing.

Who Needs TEM?

Any business can benefit from streamlined processes, cost-savings and relief from time-sink tasks.

Eliminating busy-work and cutting costs is always beneficial to smaller businesses, for whom budgets are tight and staff is stretched.

However, at the enterprise level, the complexity of the telecom environment rises sharply, bringing the potential for billing errors along with it, and the value of proper management is maximized. These organizations will see the most benefit from TEM.

How TEM Can Help

Good Telecom Expense Management will help you make the most of your resources, highlight and reduce areas of inefficiency, improve your business processes, and free up valuable staff time. The result is significant savings, in terms of both time and cost.

How TEM Delivers Savings

Savings may be delivered via any – but, ideally, all – of the following processes:

  • Telecom overcharges detected via invoice audits and recovered
  • Reduction of late fees (the best TEM providers will all but eradicate late fees)
  • Cancellation of unused services
  • Recommendations for optimization opportunities – e.g. switching service plans

Why Software Alone is Not Enough

The best TEM provision goes beyond software designed to help you solve the challenges yourself, instead providing a complete telecom management service to eliminate your telecoms burden.

When providers offer their expertise and support as well as their products, it becomes far easier to ensure your enterprise pays only for those services actually in use and is always getting the best deals for telecoms assets and services.

Fully understanding enterprise telecom rate structures, contracts and invoices requires specialist skill and technical expertise, so a software-only TEM option is only really a solution for those organizations with a strong in-house knowledge base.

Of course, powerful TEM software is necessary too – for a fully automated and highly accurate audit of invoices against asset records, which include details of service contracts.

However, to ensure your TEM software is performing as it should, you need the guidance of someone well-familiar with telecoms, carrier-billing, and IT-asset management, who is also able to get to grips with change management, accounting rules and other potential issues. 

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.

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Topics: TEM

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