Managing Wireless Phone Assets with a Modern Call Accounting Solution
April 24, 2007
By Mae Kowalke
TMCnet Contributor
Wireless devices: these days, you see people using them in all kinds of places where, only a few years ago, it would be unthinkable for people to be carrying on phone conversations and sending e-mails. Mobile communications has transformed both business practices and society at large.
For businesses, empowering employees with the ability to work from any location is a great efficiency booster. But, it also introduces a problem: how to keep track of all those devices, who is using what devices for which tasks, and how much all this is going to cost? The answer is a modern call accounting solution that can streamline the task of managing all telecom assets, both wireline and wireless.
TMCnet recently spoke with Mike DeCamillis, manager of inside sales at call accounting solutions company Avotus, to find out more about the challenges companies face in managing their wireless assets and what tools are available to help.
First up in the conversation was to define how call accounting for mobile assets differs from traditional telecom cost management.
With traditional phone assets, call detail information came from a single source—the corporate telephone system or private branch exchange (PBX
). Now, with mobile devices, billing information may come from a variety of sources. If there is a corporate plan for wireless, bills come from the wireless carrier. Because a large number of wireless devices were contracted by employees, the bills also get submitted on individual travel and expense (T&E) reports.
Plus, in a traditional PBX (News - Alert) environment, the phone just sits on the desk so it is easy to track where the asset is at all times. With wireless devices, there is little or no control inherently built into the system because employees carry these assets around with them outside the office. It is therefore possible to lose track of individual devices—for example, if an employee takes the phone with him or her when no longer working at the company.
DeCamillis also pointed out there’s a lot you can with mobile devices that's not possible with fixed-line phones—such as texting and data downloads. This means there is more potential for abuse and misuse of the assets.
“When you have more features and capabilities, you also have more expenses,” he told TMCnet.
It is also much more difficult to keep track of upgrades on wireless devices, because employees may go to the carrier on their own and get a new phone or change their personal service plan.
Generally speaking, one of the biggest challenges companies have faced in managing wireless assets is that fact that they don’t have a centralized plan to manage the wireless devices or the associated costs. They may have started off allowing individuals to purchase their own devices and expense them, but over time the number of users grew without an awareness that this was happening. The result is that there may not be a centrally managed effort to procure devices or manage their usage. In many cases, the present size of the wireless inventory could qualify the company for a better rate plan if these were all managed as corporate assets
“They need to know that they can go back to the carrier and get a pooled-minute rate plan, for example,” DeCamillis said.
In some businesses, the use of wireless devices prevents the organization from easily recovering costs. For example, law firms have traditionally tracked phone minutes and costs to bill their clients. Traditional call accounting solutions for fixed-line telephony included features that enabled this tracking, but until recently the capability wasn't available for wireless.
Here's how that tracking works for wireless: data is entered into the system that identifies certain numbers as being business-related. Reports are then generated in the call accounting system, cross-referenced with that information to determine business-related minutes. This means that, for example, a lawyer who talks to her clients while away from the office can later look up how long she spoke to each client, and bill them accordingly.
Selecting a call accounting solution that manages the task of tracking and classifying calls greatly reduces the administrative burden on the client company. It also gives companies insight into how much time a particular device is being used for personal tasks, and how much for business.
For global companies, wireless call accounting becomes even more complex. Example: wireless phones in the U.K. are billed differently than in North America. The features offered—and billed—also differ. Managing the costs for all types of services becomes a monumental challenge.
“You need a solution that can handle not just a specific geographical location, but that can handle any wireless billing format DeCamillis noted. The bottom line is that you need a future-proof system that has been designed to handle not just what exists today but also what will be available tomorrow.
The top function a modern call accounting solution addresses is visibility into telecom assets as well as costs.
“Wireless devices traditionally have been invisible to the corporation,” DeCamillis said. By visibility, he referred to an understanding of which mobile assets the company owns and what they are used for.
Contributing to this lack of visibility is the fact that, at many companies, it is not at all clear which department s should have ownership of wireless devices--IT? Telco? Finance?
“Because the ownership of wireless devices is vague, so are the resources to manage it,” DeCamillis noted. “Nobody really knows who owns the problem.”
A call accounting solution empowers companies to define this ownership, and then move on to the next step, which is optimizing wireless rate plans for the company. Because, when it comes right down to it, managing telecom assets—both wireline and wireless—is really about managing the bottom line.
The need for a call accounting solution that can handle wireless devices will only increase as time goes on, DeCamillis told TMCnet. Looking ahead, he predicted that more and more industries will start using mobile devices to do business.
This trend, he projected, will be driven by a number of factors, including the increasingly fast pace of doing business, the need to work anywhere at any time to increase efficiency, and the growing number of tasks that can be completed using mobile devices (e.g. e-mail, document editing).
“I see many more employees being equipped with wireless devices, and in some cases replacing the wireline devices,” he told TMCnet.
He added that for some companies, it may end up being less expensive and more efficient to equip employees at remote offices with wireless devices than to procure a PBX.
To lean more about call accounting for wireless devices, please visit Avotus’ Call Accounting channel on TMCnet.com.
Mae Kowalke previously wrote for Cleveland Magazine in Ohio and The Burlington Free Press in Vermont. To see more of her articles, please visit Mae Kowalke’s columnist page. Also check out her Wireless Mobility blog.
Private Branch Exchange (PBX) | X |
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