Telecom Expense Management (TEM): Everything You Need to Know

As global telecommunications grow at an accelerated rate, more tech companies are using advanced telecom expense management (TEM) services to better manage large-scale projects across multiple arms of their organizations. But what is telecom expense management, and how can it benefit your business? Here is everything you need to know. 

What is Telecom Expense Management (TEM)?

Telecom Expense Management (TEM) is typically a cloud-based service that solves a variety of pain points that would otherwise be time-consuming and costly. Due to an ever-expanding array of services being offered by today’s most influential telecom companies, telecom expense management is becoming an essential tool for maximizing ROI, assisting in project budget management, and effectively deploying new technologies. 

Given the highly complex nature of telecommunication environments, the ability to optimize operations is invaluable.

Some of the key features of TEM services include:

  • Automated expense reporting
  • Invoicing and invoice management 
  • Inventory management
  • Expense optimization
  • Provisioning
  • Bill disbursement and chargebacks
  • Enhanced security capabilities
  • Internal team management
  • Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM)

Benefits of Telecom Expense Management 

It isn’t uncommon for telecom companies to experience budget deficits, underutilized resources, and obsolete contracts. When left unresolved, these obstacles can add up quickly. 

According to Statista, the multinational telecom services industry, which includes wireless and fixed-network services, is easily a trillion-dollar market and growing. This means that accurately tracking the progress of new technology deployments and effectively managing budgets can make or break project profitability. If you consider the sheer people-hours it would take to successfully maintain that lifecycle across hundreds of offices, the bottom-line impact of this becomes more apparent. 

TEM is no replacement for a great team, but it gives them the tools they need to quickly and dynamically improve the telecom lifecycle. 

By offering a user-friendly visual dashboard that can track expenses across multiple vendors, TEM suites are designed specifically for telecommunications and IT companies to help improve upon existing processes and offer additional opportunities to expand their business. So what are some of the targeted benefits of telecom expense management services? 

Improve Visibility

Don’t let wastefulness go unnoticed. Without a precise and standardized process for managing telecommunications, it’s difficult to pinpoint what is and isn’t working for your company.

Telecom expense management helps companies attain a deeper understanding of which areas need improvement. This makes annual audits a breeze and allows telecom companies to continually re-evaluate decisions in the tech sector so they can plan for the future.

This enables all departments to globally optimize every aspect of their business and identify opportunities to save money in different areas such as inventories, payroll, and billing. 

Comprehensive Billing Capabilities 

Eliminate unnecessary spending and rectify billing errors anywhere in the world. The costs of running a global telecom company can get complicated; even the most experienced finance departments can benefit from having a solid TEM solution.

Depending on the country or geographical location of your carriers, costs can vary dramatically. It is easy to miss opportunities for savings when you factor in different currencies, billing frequency, and even language barriers.

Telecom expense management simplifies all of these obstacles and applies uniformity to achieve insights for each contract, no matter the country of origin. Beyond hard costs, efficient tools help eliminate manual errors and save valuable time by automating tasks like daily expense reporting.

Streamlined Communications

Lack of communication is a huge hurdle for telecom teams. It can prove difficult for emerging IT and telecom companies to manage an entire network’s lifecycle, especially for global enterprises. Ideally, you’ll want to have a single source of truth to streamline all functions of your business and help internal teams in multiple locations work efficiently and cohesively. 

This gives telecom companies a comprehensive overview of relevant communication systems and helps with strategic decision-making around various technologies.

Increased Security 

TEM solutions offer sweeping security features that can otherwise prove troublesome for teams of all sizes. Centralized solutions inherently help to minimize privacy risks; the fewer places sensitive information lives, the easier it is to mitigate breaches. Cloud-based solutions also reduce the burden of hosting and IT management internally. 

Tie milestones to budget items and integrate your ERP’s financial information with Sitetracker’s telecom expense management software. Our expense management tools allow teams to quickly and easily gain a comprehensive overview of financials, while easily managing access and permissions. 

No more requesting reports or wasting time trying to track down a particular piece of information regarding your budget. Sitetracker acts as a single source of truth to manage project expenses and costs. Book a demo to find out how it can help your business.