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How Communications Lifecycle Management Performs at George Washington University

Written by: Larry Foster, Head of Product Strategy

Just when you thought you knew all the terms surrounding Telecom Expense Management (TEM), there’s a next gen solution category called Communications Lifecycle Management (CLM). While traditional TEM focuses primarily on expenses and invoice processing, CLM encompasses expense management, usage, assets, service support, shared services management, and all related workflows.

CLM looks at everything from procurement to payment. Whether it’s managing voice communications, mobile, messaging, video or other, CTOs and telecom executives find the power of CLM is in its ability to move beyond just the traditional cost savings value proposition of TEM to:

• Holistically manage all aspects of communications
• Help you understand performance in the aggregate
• Demonstrate the impact on organizational performance

The key benefit of CLM is how it gives organizations one centralized view for managing every facet of communications across the entire organization. As a result, our clients are now able to optimize costs across all communications assets and services, drive more data-driven decision making, and better support stakeholders with unified services along with clear usage information for managing chargebacks.

CLM at George Washington University

One of our clients that is executing a full CLM program is George Washington University. Previously, the school was having all of its telecom-related invoices handled by the financial services department. But since the accounting team was not specialized in telecom, they typically just paid the outstanding amounts each month – knowing there were likely discrepancies in the charges.

The school wanted more visibility into the details so they could manage the whole communications environment in a more structured manner. Implementing a CLM solution pulled together all of the communications services provided to every university department across the whole infrastructure. Now, they can see internet, voice, conference, wireless and other communications utilization by area all in one central place as well as granular data such as how many data jacks and wireless access points there are, how many are used by department, how many voice lines and more. The benefits of the CLM solution has helped GW spot discrepancies, manage budgets and manage staffing levels.

To read the entire case study click here.

Communications Lifecycle Management is the logical next step for those organizations that may be using or considering implementing TEM. As the telecom environment has evolved, management tools must keep pace and give organizations improved, centralized visibility into granular details of the complex communications landscape.

I look forward to hearing your comments or questions.