What is Telecom Expense Management (TEM)?
Large organizations, must control expenses for voice and data network services.If it is done right, TEM can reduce expenses without cutting important programs. Improving how your organization manages telecom expenses, can have a dramatic impact on saving money. Best practices in managing telecom expenses are not well understood, and many enterprises struggle with defining what to include in TEM programs.Telecom Expense Management is a formal program to optimize enterprise spending on telecom services, control over expenses, and operational costs by streamlining supply chain management for telecom services. Bill auditing and refunds for large billing errors gets the most attention, but it is more. An effective TEM program manages the full lifecycle of a telecom expense with a focus on six major service domains of sourcing management, ordering and provisioning, inventory management, invoice management, usage management, dispute management, and reporting. Aberdeen Group refers to it as Total Telecom Cost Management (TTCM) and Telecom Lifecycle Management (TLM). Forrester refers to it as Telecom Expense and Inventory Management (TEIM).
The opportunities to improve efficiencies through TEM come from a number of areas. Telecom expenses produce some of the most complex bills for large organizations. Decentralized offices and remote locations make it difficult to no control who places orders with carriers and how they are placed. A wide range of fixed and mobile assets makes inventory tracking difficult, and the inventory of telecom assets and services is constantly changing.Billing often has components that are time-sensitive (such as peak vs. off peak) with volume sensitive pricing. In addition, telecom providers have varied billing formats (e.g., paper, EDI, CD ROM, E-mail, HTML, Magnetic Tapes, FTP, Web download). The terminology and classification varies from one provider to the next, and a single telecom carrier may have more than a dozen billing platforms for its services. Finally, telecom services are going through a sea of change with widespread growth of wireless services and a shift from traditional voice networks to data-centric networks, with Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) technology.
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