Global telecom expenditures recently surpassed $5T, and in the last few years alone, nearly $2B of that was composed of TEM software sales. Clearly, it’s critical to understand the role of TEM in telecom expense management.
Telecom expense management (TEM) software basically processes and organizes the large amounts of data created by your telecom billing system. TEM allows you to combine multiple telecom invoices into one monthly report, and therefore you can then make adjustments as necessary.
You can think of it almost like a P&L statement for telecom.
TEM Software Allows Companies To:
- Identify significant savings on telecom expenses
- Eliminate fraud & unauthorized charges
- Identify errors and recover funds through close inspection or an outsourced audit of wireline and wireless services
- Increase accuracy in expense tracking and reporting
TEM is designed specifically with Enterprise clients in mind. Those who may benefit most from TEM software are large companies with an extensive telecom inventory of lines, circuits, users, and locations. The average TEM user is often managing over $50,000 of phone bills per month, with even larger companies reaching upwards of $100,000 per month. The implication then is that TEM is usually cost prohibitive for smaller companies. For practical purposes, you want to average a monthly spend of several thousands of dollars across a wide platform of telecom bills in order for TEM to be a truly beneficial option.
Like any other audit software, TEM requires programming with data and billing/usage parameters, and requires review or tracking on a regular basis. TEM is used to monitor monthly invoices to ensure that billing rates match the rates in the database, to eliminate billing inaccuracies. In other words, the data you get out is only as good as the data you put into it. This means that before TEM can even begin helping you manage monthly expenses, you should have a thorough understanding of:
- Monthly billing parameters
- Usage fees
- Overage fees
- Up to date billing rates
TEM can also be set up to monitor contract expiration dates so that discounts do not vanish or contracts automatically renew without your knowledge. It can be used to identify lines with zero usage and will be able to report billing errors and track disputes in order to ensure all owed credits are posted.
TEM is best used by large clients with complex billing and extensive telecom assets who have already performed a very thorough inventory and billing review.
[author_bio username=”Ken” name=”yes”]
