A one time or recurring wireless audit will force your organization to gather data surrounding wireless spend and the wireless optimization piece will provide as much as 40% savings on that spend.
- Vendor sourcing
- Device procurement
- Asset management
- Invoice reconciliation and payment
- Reporting analytics
Vendor Sourcing
Often called wireless pooling, it is a good practice to pick three or four wireless service plans that fit your varied user profiles. You’d group a sales staff in a different pool than the programming group. Pooling is where two or more lines share a set pool of minutes. For example, 100 employees are allotted a total of 10K min. /month.
Wireless Device Procurement
Some wireless procurement partners negotiate with carriers and vendors on your behalf. Others have you conduct negotiations and choose plans on your own. Still others have hybrid solutions: they allow you to order through a portal and then get the devices for the client. An optimal procurement partner will allow customers to:
- Set up policies, pricing, and a catalog as well as have a reliable wireless help desk
- Receive branded kitting
- Use an ordering wizard
- Remote kill or replace a wireless device
Asset Management
Asset Management can help manage all your wireless devices and services. You will not only know where your assets are and how they are being used, but by whom. With the ability to track wireless assets, responsibility can be assigned to individuals, business units, stores, etc, and that’s a big step forward toward enterprise-wide cost control and meeting regulatory compliance requirements. Asset Management provides visibility to asset costs, enables future telecommunications costs to be accurately forecast, provides a “baseline” of information for analyzing future purchases
Invoice Reconciliation
Wireless Optimization is less about looking for erroneous charges as it is at looking for the best rate plans for your usage patterns or identifying and removing/tweaking underused services. This should take place every quarter and look at TOTAL not individual expenses. You might look beyond minutes to see if they want to cut out 411 or text messaging. Without focusing on the total cost of ownership of a wireless deployment, enterprises can drown in activation costs and early termination fees (ETF). When you weed out the waste and features outside of the corporate policy, as well as switch to pooling, there is generally a big savings amount realized in the first optimization, and then a smaller set of changes needed after that.
Reporting and Analytics
Optimization solution providers should deliver reports and analytics to make it clear where the problems originated and why the optimization will save money. “The biggest obstacle to enterprises attempting to deploy mobile applications is that they have different groups responsible for the different forms of mobility and no incentive for them to coordinate their activities.”
And the work shouldn’t stop there. After the initial implementation of cost-reducing changes, wireless expense management vendors can enhance your savings by reviewing your invoices on a quarterly basis and optimizing your spend throughout the year.
