Whether it is in areas of accounting, HR, or sales, database-driven business processes provide significant benefits to businesses today. Establishing a Telecom Intellegence (TI) database as the single repository of information for all IT/telecom resources and costs improves an organization’s ability to make decisions regarding their voice, data, and wireless environments by providing complete and accurate historical trends and analysis.
With a TI database and a TEM reporting application, information about IT/telecom resources, costs, vendors, assets, and more is readily available to controllers, procurement, business unit managers, and telecom and network services personnel. Armed with this detailed information, they are able to understand the financial impact of their IT/Telecom related decisions.
Consequently, costs and resource usage become more closely aligned with the actual needs of business units, and the overall operations of the organization are improved. The information in the TI database helps organizations to:
- Negotiate vendor contracts based on actual resource utilization and costs, trends, and forecasts and the identifiable impact of various vendor price proposals.
- Perform budgeting and planning at all levels—employee, business unit, division and organization.
- Assess the impact of a physical move that may require changing from one vendor’s jurisdiction to another.
- Understand the true cost structure of a particular business unit, such as a customer service group.
- Compare site by site costs for business units that perform similar functions, such as branch offices.
- Identify missing or duplicate vendor invoices and their potential impact on cash flow and P&L statements.
- Obtain early warning signals of negative cost trends.
- Determine the overall value of IT to the organization based on accurate telecom expense information.
For most organizations, the ability to more effectively and consistently address these issues has a material financial impact, especially after information has been accumulated over a 6 to12 month period or longer. An additional benefit of implementing a TI database is its ability to integrate with existing knowledge within the organization, thus leveraging past investments, minimizing labor costs, and reducing errors.
