Legacy expense monitoring systems could be preventing your business from achieving massive cost-savings.
Nowadays, organisations have to manage multiple service providers, various contracts and different currencies across the globe. Accurately keeping track of these technology expenses is almost impossible with outdated manual systems like spreadsheets.
Investing in a TEM solution is critical to achieving business success smoothly and effectively. By automatically detecting historical billing errors and highlighting unused services, you can implement spending optimisations and slash your technology costs.
Continue reading to discover the benefits of implementing a TEM solution and the areas you can improve by streamlining your technology expense management.
The Benefits of Technology Expense Management
Gartner estimates that EMEA spending on communication services will reach 430 million in 2021 — an increase of 2.2% from 2020. TEM helps organisations get this spending under control by boosting visibility over their expenses and identifying optimisation opportunities. Other benefits include:
Invoice processing efficiencies
Simply put, invoice management involves receiving, validating and paying supplier invoices. However, manual invoice processing can be inefficient and lead to inaccuracies. TEM automates the process and quickly flags errors to realise savings.
Transparent inventory management
With TEM, you can clearly understand the technology services you have and where you have them. Gaining visibility into inventory ownership, attributes and location across spend categories through a single platform makes it easy to adjust inventory if needed.
Less time spent on admin
In the UK, employees typically spend 142 minutes each day doing admin — that’s 76 working days across a 48-week year.
TEM solutions use automation to cut down on the amount of time spent on tedious, repeatable tasks (for example, invoice processing) so your team can invest more time in business growth and achieving your goals.
Forecasting technology expenses
Technology expense management is more than just assessing your current usage. With robust reporting and in-depth analytics, you can access vast amounts of data about usage and spending. This helps you identify trends in your business to make informed predictions about your future spend on technology.
The Main Business Areas Impacted by TEM
TEM has the power to positively impact various branches of an organisation. The Enterprise Technology Management Association (ETMA) listed the major focus areas, including:
1. Inventory management and change control
With full visibility over your technology usage, TEM empowers you to take control of your assets. Having all your organisation’s usage data (across different branches, countries, etc.) on a centralised platform means you can create value by identifying waste, abuse and unnecessary expenditure.
2. Sourcing and procurement
It’s no longer sustainable to manage enterprise-wide sourcing and procurement manually via spreadsheets. With multiple suppliers, contracts and payment terms, you risk wasting time and money trying to secure the best possible rates.
With TEM, procurement managers can leverage detailed contract data to discover valuable information to support their contract negotiations.
3. Invoice management
Manually processing invoices is not only time-consuming but can lead to inaccuracies which drive up costs. For example, 27% of EMEA businesses are subject to duplicate invoicing, and it can be difficult to identify these manually on spreadsheets — especially in larger organisations.
TEM automatically analyses where discrepancies could be causing a money drain, as well as automatically handling the monitoring, verification and payment of invoices.
4. Expense management (including validation and optimisation)
TEM gives users the ability to effectively analyse and track their telecom expenditure. In the past, organisations often operated in a single country with a single technology provider. Now they’re globally dispersed with a more complex technology environment (different contracts, rates, locations).
A centralised TEM solution works by analysing how your organisation is using their technology budget to identify cost optimisations and savings.
5. Usage management
With a TEM tool, you can effectively monitor voice, video and data usage across your organisation’s departments. Thanks to these detailed insights, you can analyse traffic, anomalies and trends for cost justification and optimisation.
6. Reporting
Effective TEM vendors provide accurate reporting on your technology contracts and equipment to better inform decision-making when considering improvements or expansions to your estate.
7. Business Intelligence
TEM provides actionable insights into your business to help you make strategic decisions. By automating your technology expense management, you can have a pulse on all the changes in your technology inventories to make smarter business decisions to achieve your goals.
Choosing the Right TEM Solution
When investing in a TEM solution, there are some critical aspects that you need to consider to maximise your return on investment.
Firstly, don’t settle for a technology expense management solution that doesn’t offer full visibility over your inventory. With companies now spanning continents, enterprises can’t afford to have blind spots in their technology estate. Full TEM efficiency comes when you combine automated invoicing technology with inventory accuracy.
According to Gartner’s “Market Guide for Telecom Expense Management Services 2020”, you need to evaluate TEM providers “not only on their existing capabilities but also on their roadmaps and their vision” because scaling companies need scalable solutions. Make sure the TEM provider is showing ambition and expanding their capabilities to ensure the solution can scale alongside your company’s growth.
Finally, a modern TEM solution will be better equipped to meet your business goals. This doesn’t necessarily mean new, but the platform should be regularly updated and upgraded to meet evolving technology needs. For example, check that the TEM provider is ready to include your cloud computing, Internet of Things, and other technology spend in your program to keep up with industry advancements.
Discover Effective Technology Expense Management with Calero
Our technology expense management solution gives you the visibility you need to get your organisation’s spending under control and identify opportunities for cost-savings.
Contact us today for a free consultation and discover how your organisation can start saving time and money with technology expense management.
