Everything You Need to Know About Telecom Expense Management

As a business leader, you are continually working to take your company to greater heights. To accomplish this task, controlling monthly costs associated with your telecommunications assets is a necessity. Telecom Expense Management (TEM) is a complex endeavor and one that is vital to get right. TEM encompasses managing telecom spend and contracts, assets and inventory, sourcing and procurement, and more.

Just as every industry evolves, Telecom Expense Management has grown to incorporate elements of technology expense management as well. With this change, TEM has become about managing the entire supply chain for telecommunications and technology assets. The goal has become streamlining expense management to create huge savings in administrative and service costs.

What makes TEM so valuable?

Cost Savings

• Companies often realize the need for a TEM strategy when reviewing the annual expenses in their IT budget. Globally, companies spend nearly 1.5 trillion dollars annually on communication services alone, utilizing, on average, 40% of the IT budget.
• TEM has consistently resulted in massive cost reductions when done right. LinkSource saves companies an average of 35% on their technology spend.

Time and Efficiency Boost

• Streamlining the audit process, asset management, order fulfillment, and payment operations results in controlled costs, reduced risks, and increased accuracy and efficiency.
• When you manage technology expenses effectively, you can reallocate staff to focus on your company’s primary strategic competencies.

Visibility into Your Environment

• You cannot solve problems when you do not have the data needed to identify what and where those problems are. With a properly managed TEM partnership, you can identify avoidable costs caused by errors, fraud, and process bottlenecks.
• Keeping track of voice, data, internet, and other technology expenses is a time-consuming and expensive task.

TEM is about more than just software solutions.

To benefit from a full visual into your company’s deficiencies, having a software TEM solution alone is insufficient. Software on its own isn’t going to solve your TEM issues. To make a real difference, you need a professional who understands all aspects from the technology to the billing. LinkSource collaborates with our clients to create a technology expense strategy that’s fully customized to the individual business, its goals, and its IT and network requirements, taking the hassle out of telecom management while saving you money. This strategic implementation is not achievable with a software solution alone.

Transparency of Costs

To successfully implement an impactful TEM strategy, you need the make data-based decisions. As a dedicated TEM partner, LinkSource can conduct an intricate benchmarking analysis, reviewing all elements of your telecommunications and technology costs. During this process, we identify hidden costs and unused services, so you gain visibility into what you spend on voice, data, and cloud services. We then benchmark your expenses by comparing them to over 1,500 customer data points. This information is then utilized to formulate a market-specific cost reduction strategy as it relates to your unique industry, size, and location, giving you the expertise needed to provide a technology strategy for your current needs and plans for future growth.

Negotiation for the Best Price

Making changes to your service providers can be a massive decision with significant financial and technological implications. When deciding whether to stay with your current technology provider, you are often able to renegotiate your contracts to bring down costs. If it is found that switching to an alternative provider would benefit the company more, leveraging your company’s position with a previous service gives you an edge in negotiations. LinkSource identifies how you can best implement the changes that are going to benefit your company in both the short and long term.

Proactive Assessment for Long-Term Cost Saving

The longer you wait to develop an impactful TEM strategic partnership, the more difficult and expensive it can become to make much needed changes. When your systems become highly integrated with the current technology solutions you utilize and those systems become obsolete, your ability to adapt to market changes is diminished. By evaluating your technology integrations at the outset and setting your company up with an ingrained ability to scale, you provide a foundation for cost-effective and adaptable decision making.

Building a Smarter TEM Strategy

If you’re not looking for cost-saving opportunities, you won’t find them. Each company’s technology expense management demands are unique. That's why it's important to work with a professional team to design a strategy that fits your company's specific needs. For more information on how to do this and tips on enhancing your TEM efforts, subscribe to our blog!