Analyzing your company’s telecom expenses
Telecommunications consultants usually are the people to whom corporations outsource the work of Telecommunications Expense Management (TEM). Telecom Expense Management deals with collecting data about current telecom expenses and finding new methods of reducing these expenses. Telecom consultants use several methods to obtain data about the current telecom bills and see where most of the money is being spent. They can ask the designated telecom service providers to provide the telecom invoices for the company as well as the applicable telecom tariff. The telecommunications consultant can then use the invoice to see if the charges made to the company were abiding by the rates on the tariff.
Another method of evaluating the expenditure of the company on telecom expenses is by installing telecommunications management software on all the corporate systems which are attached to a company phone. This is particularly useful for call centers as nearly all of their phones are connected to a computer. The software could be bought off the market or could be made on order by a person or a company. What the software would do is that it would present you with the expenditure on a specific service such as the worldwide and local calls as well as calls to landlines or mobile phones. All of this would help the Telecom Expense Management Company get insight on the spending pattern of the company which would in turn help in planning the steps that should be taken to reduce the telecommunication expenses.
Telecom Expense Management companies take a look at the individual expenditures of the people of a company on telephones to gain data about where calls are made and which departments or posts have the highest usage of telephones. This may give them info about the fundamental workings of the company and provide them with valuable information such as which person is using up more minutes than necessary and in which department can there be changes made to reduce the number of calls. If the company has handed out personal wireless phones to employees then the TEM Consultant will have to use Wireless Expense Management techniques to gain info about the calls made by the employee. Information of the calls made by employees can be gained by asking for statements from the service providers and checking if the person is not abusing his mobile phone usage for personal purposes. An example of this would be that if a person makes several lengthy international phone calls to non-company numbers, it is most likely that the nature of the call was personal.
Companies wanting to hire a Telecom Expense Management firm may also provide the information and data about the company’s telecom expenses themselves which is a good cost–cutting measure and it helps reduce the time taken for the TEM firm to gather all the data. The telecommunications consultant then uses this data to give a breakdown of expenses which he or she thinks is either not of much use to the company or where optimization can occur and if he/she believes that the expense is fundamental to the working of the company, the consultant may leave the expenditure as it was. The analyst can also compare the tariffs of the telecom company to the competition to see if its rates are good enough or the contract should be awarded to another company.
Altech is listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) and is an investment holding company, involved in the telecommunications, multi-media and information technology industries, which employs over 5 000 employees in South Africa and abroad.
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