What Telecom Expense Management Is – And Isn’t

A Short History of TEM (Hint: It Wasn’t Pretty Much of the Time)

The Inescapable Value of CLM

As the moniker implies, CLM is a holistic process. It manages all aspects of an enterprise’s communications services and equipment. This applies from infrastructure design and contract negotiation to procurement and end-of-life decommissioning.

The scope of CLM goes much broader and deeper than TEM ever did on its own.

TEM, with expense management only at the invoice level, is now a niche, and vital, part of CLM. Many enterprises still rely on traditional landlines, broadband connections and T1 circuits. Add to that any associated devices and service plans. These continue to need auditing, moves/adds/changes/disconnects, monitoring and quality control. But telecom is far from the only area of administration within a CLM strategy.

Here are some ways in which One Source delivers fully managed CLM, which includes telecom expense management:

Centralize Management & Improve Decision Making

  • Establish single-source-of-truth for all corporate IT, mobile, and telecom devices, equipment, services, contracts, SLAs
  • Protect, control all corporate assets by enforcing procurement, usage, disposal, and security policies
  • Maintain compliance with industry and government regulations

Optimize Communications & Technology Expenditures

  • Optimize investments in communications devices, equipment, services, software by balancing cost-effectiveness and service quality. “Pay for what you need”
  • Reduce costs by contract negotiation, effective contract management, enforcing SLAs, eliminating erroneous charges. “Pay for what you use”
  • Promote financial accountability through reporting of indiscriminate use of company resources

Around-the-Clock Help Desk Staffed by Specialists

  • Get real-time updates associated with all service, repair issues
  • Reduce downtime through our dedicated carrier escalation channels
  • Lean on our team for moves, adds, changes, and disconnects

Expense Management/Bill Payment

  • Simplify invoice management
  • Audit services monthly to identify billing anomalies and control costs
  • Improve employee productivity – streamline invoice processing through consolidated repository for all services
  • Ensure on-time payment of invoices with advance bill management and payment processing; eliminate rushed invoice validation

Sourcing, Procurement

  • Identify and cut unnecessary services through inventory centralization, visibility
  • Avoid unnecessary rate hikes through contract lifecycle management
  • Use our carrier-agnostic system to ensure the right services drive operational excellence
  • Let us handle commissioning, deployment of telecom/network services, mobility solutions

Usage Optimization/Cost Recovery

  • Translate usage trends, turn business needs into implemented changes
  • Prevent indiscriminate usage through granular reporting
  • Recover billing errors through our fully managed bill dispute management process
  • Provide visibility to end users, management through shared services charge-back reporting
  • Confirm receipt of appropriate credits through fully managed SLA enforcement
The benefits of fully managed CLM are many. One of the most important is the partnership created between enterprise and vendor. In an ideal scenario, the enterprise outsources most, if not all, CLM needs to an expert managed services provider. A further benefit is that organizations are empowered to focus on their customers. IT staff don’t have to spend their time on routine, repetitive, low-value tasks. They funnel their talents and training into contributing to revenue generation. And what organization doesn’t want that? Taking advantage of fully managed CLM will lead to success and outcomes you might never have expected. Along the way, you won’t have to worry about how to handle the ever-changing field of communications lifecycle management and all the confusing acronyms. We’ll take care of all that for you.

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