One Company Delivers Telecom Expense Savings Beyond The Norm
August 19, 2014
By Steve Anderson, Contributing TMCnet Writer
Savings are something most people eagerly pursue. Save a bit of money on gas, save a bit on the bills, save a bit on phone service and so on down the line. But telecommunications haven't often offered a lot of room for savings — that's been changed recently with the growth of things like voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) service, however — and finding those savings emerge is a pleasant surprise indeed. During the recent IT Financial Management Association Conference, meanwhile, NetPlus' own Jim McDonald, who serves as director of strategic accounts, offered up commentary on ways to better use telecommunications tools as a means to drive more savings than just on the phone bill.
McDonald's remarks examined what to do with telecommunications, rather than making it a simple cost center to be focused on in terms of cost reduction. While telecom expense management (TEM) is an important part of the picture—the kind of thing that's previously driven some firms to consider replacing standard phone service with VoIP or the like—it shouldn't be taken in isolation, as there are plenty of other options that telecommunications can step in to provide. For instance, McDonald talked about bringing in telecommunications for inventory management, for improving a business' processes and modifying workflows to better take advantage of a business' strengths and downplay its weaknesses.
NetPlus is actually in an excellent position to discuss such points, as it offers a variety of services that go beyond TEM to produce savings for companies that put such services to work. Of course, NetPlus offers TEM services, including things like charge-back billing and cable plant matters. But NetPlus can also offer support for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs), using up to 10,000 lines of service, offering trouble tickets, work orders and more. NetPlus' wireless management systems work out well for tracking inventory as it moves throughout a system, and can even offer invoice and contract management systems with cost allocation to help drive the use of communications in other ways, like the rapidly-growing machine to machine (M2M) communications market.
Communications are rapidly growing beyond the point of simply connecting one user with another. Communications build the foundation of a variety of new business points, ranging from the “bring your own device” (BYOD) concept to the mobile workforce. When it's easier to communicate, physical location doesn't matter so much as the work gets done either way. What's more, communications are helping to drive revenue growth; Web-based real time communications (WebRTC) is finding its way into more and more company websites, as a way to provide users with an easy way to ask questions when said users are most interested in making purchases, thus making a sale more likely. Now with M2M becoming more a part of the market, users have a whole new way to communicate, specifically, with shipments of inventory as they move from one place to another.
NetPlus made it that much clearer; communications have a lot of use beyond simply connecting one user to another, and getting the most out of communications shouldn't focus on how much can be saved, but rather, how much value can be derived.