How to get visibility over your mobile spend 

The cost of running mobile services and assets is significant. Gartner estimates that the service cost alone, is only a small part of the company’s cost. And Forrester pegs it at just one third of the total cost of ownership. Putting aside internal operating costs, the direct service and asset costs themselves – one of the largest line items on a CFO’s expense ledger – can become inefficient unless the right visibility is there for smart telecom expense management. 

Aberdeen Consulting’s research director estimates that around 7% of the services invoiced on a carrier’s bill can be incorrect – and when telecom services run up into the millions, this becomes a hard number to ignore. So, without hiring a full-time team of bill auditors, how do you get the type of visibility over your spend to deliver the best governance and savings? 

Cleary see the services you have and are using

A strong telecom expense and mobility lifecycle management system can give you visibility into what you are paying for and using vs. what you’re paying for and not using. However, strong decision-making calls for more granularity than this, and so any expense management system should also show you:

• The trends of mobility spend across the organisation 
• The cost centres that are taking responsibility for each service 
• Exactly which users are spending more and on what 

These aspects give IT and Finance the information needed to make quick and effective cost control decisions. However, driving accountability through the organisation also requires giving the user visibility over their own spend. Bluewater Control does exactly this – and more. 

Using dashboard widgets, Bluewater clearly demonstrates all active services and associated costs across all product types. 

The platform also demonstrates cost centre trends, showing associated costs across all business units month on month. 

The platform enables you to instantly identify top spend users… 

… and deliver monthly batched reports to users to show them their own spend behaviours, enabling them to modify if required (and ultimately take accountability). 

Understand what the data is telling you

As demand for data grows, data plans are growing too, and shared data pools can be huge. Keeping an eye on data usage across your business is therefore key to right-sizing your service package. If you can manage the pool or lower the cost of data, you’re freeing up resource capacity for improved services and efficiencies. 

If you have the right management tool, you can place accountability for management of data usage into the hands of the users and cost centre managers themselves. 

This data reporting shows data usage against every user’s allowance, lapsed time against data refresh, and highlights heavy users requiring action. 

Bluewater can also send automatic email notifications to recipients to ensure data coverage is maintained across your fleet. 

See the assets you have

Once you have your service spend and data under control, you can turn your attention to your assets. Mobile assets create significant cost, and keeping track of assets and their assignment is essential to strong telecoms expense management. 

Bluewater Control’s asset register enables you to easily allocate assets to its service and user. It connects directly to the procurement module to allocate new devices at the procurement stage. 

Keeping a close eye on spend, performance and efficiency is the baseline of strong leadership decision making. However, a surprising number of organisations still do not have clear visibility over mobile spend, or a practical, efficient, and timely way of controlling it. 

Platforms such as Bluewater Control are easy-to-implement and can give full visibility into data usage, services and assets in just weeks, and can easily save an organisation three times the cost of the platform in the first year.