Continual Improvement Best Practices for TEM
Tuesday, September 7th, 2010Rockefeller and Standard Oil gave the world inexpensive refined oil by continual improvement –decreasing the cost of even the humble stopper in a barrel of oil while maintaining quality. Japanese called this process Kaizen and using it gave consumers cars renowned for not breaking down.
Many firms see telecom expense management (TEM) as a process of bill processing and auditing, along with periodic contract negotiation. They do not see the opportunity for continuous improvement through lowered costs and better service year after year.
Continual savings do not come from periodic contract negotiations every few years or looking for billing errors that shouldn’t be there in the first place. Best practices require looking for continual improvements as prices decline, superior solutions come to market, and business needs diverge from current services. Firms that put in place these best practices realize savings of 20-50% compared with firms that do not implement these best practices.
Three Approaches
There are three primary ways to cut costs, all of which require a firm understanding of the company’s current infrastructure and bill detail. The three approaches are bill validation, infrastructure optimization, and contract management. This means that every single service must be individually scrutinized to ensure that the service is being billed for correctly, the service still serves a business need, and the service is billed for at market rate.
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