Quickcomm quotes the Gartner Group as stating that telecom invoices, on average, have a 7-12 percent margin of error. At that rate a company with a telecom budget of $10 million can expect $1 million or so to literally slip through the cracks in a flawed internal accounting and audit system. The loss is not necessarily for lack of interest or effort as much as for lack of consolidation, automation and visibility. That’s where Quickcomm comes in, says Senior Vice President Louis Crespo in a recent interview with Telecom Reseller.
He states that the primary job of telecom managers is designing, optimizing and keeping the network up-and-running. In even a medium-size multisite company this often translates into multiple voice and data, landline and mobile networks involving a considerable number of carriers and service providers. In a large or multinational enterprise the complexity easily increases. Underlying all that is the challenge of managing associated expenses reflected in recurring and non-recurring charges appearing on hundreds or even thousands of vendor invoices. This generally means working closely with corporate contract administration and accounting groups, which can be difficult at best.
Quickcomm’s Telecom Expense Management (TEM) solution integrates all related functions including contract and service provisioning, service inventory, invoice auditing and tracking, and the payment process. Once the database is built and populated with vendor, contract and service information, the preferred data input method is electronic. It interfaces with hundreds of carrier and provider bill formats and media including CD, tape, EDI and XML.
TEM creates one database and view, ensuring accuracy of vendor billing against the contract and providing an effective means of validating legitimacy of a given service. Circuits or other services associated with shuttered sites or ex-employees become obvious and can be eliminated, with documentation to recover overbillings. It also interfaces with internal systems and applications such as finance and HR to assist the accounting department in determining legitimacy of invoices and specific line items. Such interfaces also track payments by check number, processing date, etc. to make sure the vendor applies the payment correctly.
TEM runs on any browser that has an installed Adobe Flash Player. This minimizes the software footprint while offering functionality, portability and ease-of-use. Executives, managers and other users can create their own dashboards to gain visibility into any aspect of the expense stream whether by site, geography, service, vendor or other parameter.
TEM also serves as a workflow engine which allows a manager to assign and track the progress of activities such as provisioning and bill auditing. It is available either as licensed software or Software as a Service (SaaS), where Quickcomm manages and assumes responsibility for system backups, database mirroring and hardware redundancy.
It is intended for relatively large enterprises with annual telecom expenses in the range of $10 million or more, although somewhat smaller organizations may find its benefits equally attractive. The cost runs approximately 1% of the managed expenses, which certainly could give a manager reason to pause. However, the potential savings in manpower due to automation can mitigate a lot of that concern. When considered in the context of the potential savings in illegitimate or unnecessary service expenses, TEM can be a real bargain.
More at quickcomm.com.
© 2008 Telecom Reseller. All Rights Reserved.