More than just a phone bill: the true cost of mobility lies in its management
What’s the real cost of ownership of your mobile fleet? It’s more than the bill you get every month!
The cost of mobility is more than just the service subscription or physical device; it is the internal and external time to manage this asset class and the risk that poor governance creates. Yet, many large organisations don’t use a mobility management platform and still manage their mobile fleets and general telecom expenses in a basic way, tracking and auditing activity in spreadsheets or fragmented databases, with poor visibility and minimal control.
Optimisation of the mobile fleet is frequently only considered every two to three years when the telco contract comes up for renewal – if at all. Sound familiar?
IT departments need to manage new devices, movements, adds and changes, and of course there’s constant questions from the finance department or cost centres around the bill! Many need to also ensure that billed devices are locked down with the appropriate end-point security management. These tasks add up to considerable work when you are talking about being across 1000’s of mobile end points. Then there is the job for finance to analyse, report and allocate to business units to ensure accountability for spend. Recognise this in your business?
End-to-end mobility management is becoming more complex. With this complexity comes the demand for a more sophisticated approach to enterprise mobility management. But while this need may be clear to you as someone in IT or Finance being responsible for the tasks, it can take more proof to convince your organisation’s decision-makers that investing in a sophisticated Mobility Management Platform will provide a return.
Despite this complexity, the work does still get done – because it has to. However, if you’ve only ever seen the way you’ve been doing it until now, and don’t know there’s a more efficient way, you’d think you’re doing ok. Here are some greener pastures that visualise how good it can be:
In business, governance is crucial. What would your workflows look like if you could access an up-to-date and accurate database of the devices in your fleet, who they’re assigned to, what cost centres are associated with them, and related billing information?
How often do you encounter hidden costs? Find out that a service you cancelled six months ago is still active? Do you suspect that if you just cleaned out an old storage cupboard, you’d find a stash of devices?
Hidden costs are quite common. Not just the examples above, but the real total cost of ownership. Fragmented workflows, and communicating with your MSP via multiple email chains means a lot of small items slip through the cracks. Those items add up.
As the number of mobile devices grows, so does the potential for unused or unallocated services and devices. The ability to identify, redeploy or cancel a service or device requires having the right visibility. Organisations who streamline processes and information with a Mobility Management Platform achieve a significant return on their investment through visibility and control.
How many hours (or days) do you spend doing the same tasks every month? Whether it’s reporting on billing, reconciliation, or requesting the same information from the same teams every month, we’ve all got repetitive, laborious tasks to do.
Using technology to automate these processes is, thankfully, something that’s available. How long does it take to generate a general ledger for you? What would it mean to you if you could do it with a single click? What would it mean if you could set this on an automated schedule and it arrives in your inbox exactly when you need it, already completed?
Outsourcing managed mobility services to a trusted partner will open the door to best practice knowledge and services, as well as tailored support for your business. Outsourcing MMS also creates flexibility as your organisation expands or changes, improving governance and increasing visibility over complete mobility spend.
Although the number of services, types of assets and the importance of enterprise mobility to your business continues to expand, we suspect many organisations are still managing this area the same way they did a decade ago. This is good news for you! Not only will taking a more sophisticated approach to MMS in 2020 and beyond deliver you a significant return on investment, but it will also keep you ahead of the pack.
Streamlining processes and removing manual work not only saves time, but it reduces errors. Many operational costs are driven by broken workflow. Whether it’s managing the day-to-day tasks of a mobility fleet, analysing and allocating bills, addressing questions or reporting on activity, without the right information at their fingertips your departments will spend days and days on tasks that can be done in minutes. Gone are the days when an organisation doesn’t have the right tools to manage supplier spend efficiently.
As a last point if you haven’t already engaged a mobility partner to help manage your services, it’s worthwhile to look at this within your approach. Outsourcing managed mobility services to a trusted partner will open the door to best practice knowledge and services, as well as tailored support for your business. Outsourcing MMS also creates flexibility as your organisation expands or changes, improving governance and increasing visibility over complete mobility spend.
To be efficient and maximise investment, an organisation can benefit from a Mobility Management Platform through:
Ask yourself: How much timeam I spending on each task, from procurement, to reporting, to analysis?
Ask yourself: Am I able to easily pull together the information I need to get a full understanding of the status and history or the services and device fleet, or does it take me hours or days to understand the ecosystem?
Ask yourself: Does my organisation and departments know who eac device is assigned to and what their usage is?
Ask yourself: Do I know why my mobility costs have gone up or down compared to the last month? In which cost centre? Due to which employee? And why?
In a mobile led world, managing devices and expense is not a traditional Telecom Expense Management requirement. Understanding a bill is one thing, but improving how you manage the overall asset class, and potentially across multiple carriers, is the most important thing. With the growth of mobiles, it is more important than ever for organisations to ensure they have a tool within their operations to efficiently take control.
What’s the real cost of ownership of your mobile fleet? It’s more than the bill you get every month!
This post on mobility management was written in conjunction with one of our partners, Calibre One. Spend on mobile services is growing rapidly, with Grand View Research estimating the fixed and voice market size in 2021 at $124.2 billion USD. Yet, most companies only give their telecom fleet a second thought when their carrier renewal comes up […]
Q: What does the platform implementation process look like? A: At Bluewater we aim for an 8-week platform implementation process. The key part of this is getting the right data from your organisation (employees, services, cost centres) and establishing the required workflows and reports. Within just a week your platform will already give you better […]
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