We loved this article we found on ETMA’s (Enterprise Technology Management Association) website’s Expert Blog/Thought Leadership recently. It speaks plainly about technology expense management’s role in an enterprise-level organization’s budgeting process and management. We have found that, as the article says, there is sometimes a mindset that “costs are pretty static, they’re about the same each month” is not smart management thinking.
“Using a TEM platform gives an enterprise a single, normalized view of their organization’s IT and telecom estate. This enables more accurate and informed forecasting of their annual budgets and identifies redundant services which can be eliminated.
In many organizations, confusion and contradiction often exists amongst multiple budget lines, account payables and outputs. TEM enables rationalization and harmonization of various views providing clarity with the ability to zoom in and zoom out with different views of the estate from a budget perspective.
Although an enterprise’s budget might be well maintained at a high level, it can be difficult to explain exactly what makes up the costs from individual budget lines for respective providers. This lack of visibility gets exacerbated when a company goes through a large- scale migration project, or is part of a merger or acquisition activity, to give just two examples. In such instances, being able to track the reduction in one budget line against the increase of another is imperative for good management control. It’s no longer acceptable for management to have a mindset that “the costs are pretty static, they’re about the same each month.” One of Europe’s largest retailers benefited from a review comparing various elements; using a combination of price book costs. This gave Management a clear picture of their ongoing spend, historic and, redundant services. Working closely with the retailer and its network providers, we were able to manage and adjust the budget accordingly.
Providing this kind of flexibility to a client helps them in a number of ways; it means that managing the budget going forward becomes far easier, and also makes the invoice payment process more closely aligned to the existing budget, and it makes tracking and paying invoices far simpler.
To cite our European retailer client, giving greater visibility of the underlying spend in the budget provided detailed product level information that allowed them to drastically reduce their budget and manage special projects like a complex WAN migration. Significant cost that would have been otherwise ignored without TEM was given this greater level of transparency. It highlighted services which had been left within the estate for years from previous projects which were still actively billing, and due to the incumbent invoice approval process had never been picked up.
Using TEM not only provides an enterprise with a clearer, more accurate budgeting process, but it also enables a deeper understanding of their entire IT and telecom estate, meaning costs can be tracked as well as reduced against the current budget, while forecasting for the following year.”
If this article motivates you to dig in a little more about understanding and managing your IT and telecom expenses, look no further. Inverse Technology Solutions has been providing TEM services to clients for decades. While we help all clients, we find that those with multiple locations, especially geographically dispersed, benefit from our services most and save the most money. We would be honored to help your organization with your TEM expense management. Just call 800-854-2444 or visit our website, www.inversetech.com. You can schedule a consult directly from there.