Cimpl Blog

So you’ve decided to take back control of your technology costs. Your business has decided that there is a major need to take back the reigns, and gain full transparency over your telecom and technology environment.

As a business, you continually purchase equipment, software, tools, services, and other technology assets. With so many assets to worry about, things can quickly become overwhelming to track. Your inventory is growing alongside your business, and you might decide that neglecting the need to track your assets is easier. However, avoiding your mountain of assets isn’t going to make them organize themselves.

    Typically, businesses have equipped their offices with PBX phone systems, as well as other similar tools, such as IP Telephony systems, for employees, managers, and chief executives to make work-related phone calls. This comes with a much needed ability to keep track of usage across a company’s phone lines. These PBX phone systems allow for logging of records in order to provide reporting, typically with the help of add-on software. This way, businesses get the cost allocation and cost visibility that’s needed. This way they can keep track of who is using which phone lines, who they are calling, and what kind of telecom expenses are associated with it. Phone calls are rated and the data is easily retrievable. All of this allows managers and employees to verify calls that have been made, and finance teams to access the required data to chargeback departments the costs associated with their extensions.

When selecting a Telecom Expense Management (TEM) vendor, the process of evaluating solutions might not seem so complicated. Everyone is essentially selling the same product, right? Let’s rewind a minute, many providers say they offer Telecom Expense Management but what they do can vary in multiple ways, provide a variety of bundles or variations and flavours to the services you can sign up for. In order to effectively decide on a vendor, you must first decide on what objectives you want to achieve. Is your focus inventory management, cost optimization or automating processes across all of your organization; or maybe it’s all of the above? While one option may cost less the day you sign, what you are looking for are long-term results. Once you know what you want to achieve, you will need to figure out if you will need a Self-Managed or a Fully-Managed solution. Some vendors will make both options available with some variances. Understanding the difference between fully-managed and self-managed is key to getting the most out of a TEM solution.

Typically, getting your hands on the reports you need in a timely manner, for a reasonable price, can be challenging. Many Telecom Expense Management (TEM) providers charge extra fees when clients request a report, due to the programming and customization involved to create a report in the backend of the software. Reports are a necessity for many businesses who need a clear-cut view of their data in a sensible way, and being subject to expensive charges is a common problem. Decision-makers who require very detailed reports in order to understand data properly can end up incurring costs and waiting around for long periods of time just to see your own data. “Only 55% of all telecom reporting generated today is considered standard, leaving a significant portion of reporting as ad-hoc.” – AOTMP, State of the Telecom Management Industry 2016.

Cimpl currently serves a public Canadian insurance company that provides its services to over 3 million customers. With nearly 10,000 employees and about 1,200 departments, managing MACDs became quite a challenge. Before implementing Cimpl, the company’s IT executives kept track and managed over 18,000 assets and services manually, through multiple different systems and Excel sheets. In using several different systems to organize their assets, the company often lost track of where specific assets were, leaving them uncertain about what assets they actually owned. Finding invoices and billing anomalies became an impossible feat. At the same time, the company had several vendors to track and pay.

Over the course of the past decade, Telecom Expense Management (TEM) has been described as “needed now more than ever,” by multiple TEM providers, customers, as well as different media outlets such as TMC net back in 2008. The TEM playing field has been evolving and changing rapidly over the years, with some providers changing directions entirely, and others focusing on growing within the industry. Telecom Expense Management has been adjusting to the many changes and technological innovations that have spread across the world of Telecom over the past decade. Business needs are growing, and according to Gartner’s recent predictions for 2017 and 2018, so is IT Spend. As companies grow in their technology and services, their Telecom Expense Management platforms must accommodate.

The Telecom Expense Management (TEM) industry has reached a crossroad.  Market gorillas are looking to grow, and are doing so through acquisitions and mergers. I would like to raise whether these roll-ups have served their customers as well as it has served their financial backers.

Joining the ranks of major players in the banking, energy, and retail sectors who rely on Cimpl’s services on a daily basis, we are proud to say that a large publicly traded construction company is now a part of our family.

According to Wikipedia , Telecom Expense Management is defined as merely being “the management of wireless and wireline service and asset expenses,” while Technology Expense Management is defined as “the management of technology costs such as software licenses, computer equipment, applications, etc.”

Bringing the Value of IT to Light For the uninitiated, a bill of IT is a bill of materials which clearly and transparently explains the cost of IT services and devices in a way that’s easily understood by business end-users. If key decision-makers in a business don’t understand how technology gives an edge, then that’s wasted potential. Worse yet, if competitors have recognized the potential, then they will have a serious strategic advantage. That’s why one of the critical functions of IT lies in communicating the value it brings using technology that business people can understand. And in comes the bill of IT to help with that task.