What is TEM?

TEM stands for Telecommunications Expense Management.

It is an encompassing term that refers to the overall management and maintenance of mobile, voice and data services for your company. This is a process you can do yourself via a web-based platform or you can partner with a TEM service provider to do these services for you. Whoever does it, in plain English, it means gathering all your telecom invoices and looking for billing errors through a telecom audit, identifying contract violations, searching ways to save money and negotiating with telecom providers/vendors for a better deal.

Why does an enterprise/SMB need TEM?

The easiest answer and the one most companies’ management teams want to hear is – “it saves your money.”

How does it save Telecom cost?

For a successful and profitable business today, you need tools and technology like fixed lines, mobile phones, broadband internet connections, laptops and PDAs with wireless capabilities; the list gets longer not only as new gadgets hit the market, but also as the number of people within your organization, who needs these things grows. All of that leads to complexity and complexity can lead to errors in billing and managing the telecom inventory.

Forrester Research estimates that billing errors average over 4 to 12 percent of the ongoing telecom services budgets. We would concur with it. In a study done by a TEM audit firm, which is in business for many years, it was found that over one third of invoices have some type of error. If you’re not watching for them, you just don’t see them. A TEM provider says, in just one example, a health care facility demolished a building. But, when they audited their telecom invoices, it was found that they had been billed and paying for 50 landline telephones in a non-existent building that had become a parking lot many years before.

Now that is a huge error and you think you’d find it yourself – but you know what? With complexity also comes workload. Your telecom inventory may include enormous number of monthly invoices, circuits or devices. And if you choose to hand telecom management to the existing staff that often isn’t familiar with TEM services and thus doesn’t know the process and what to look for, it will not help.

There are also outside market pressures at work. Things are constantly getting more complex and expensive. According to Aberdeen Research, firms are also dealing with financial regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley compliance, new technology implementation, globalization, vendor consolidation and security concerns with sensitive data that is not centrally managed.

It all points to a compelling need for automated TEM processes, whether self-managed or outsourced. According to Gartner, the heart of any TEM offering is an automated software solution used by the business or by a TEM provider managing a company’s telecom invoices and inventory. And it is an assured bet to save your money. As stated by the AOTMP report “SMBs with a TEM solution save 22% more than companies, who manually manage their telecom invoices and inventory”. Now is the time.