AnchorPoint's Map-to-Win Telecom Expense Management Strategy Helps Enterprises Streamline Business Processes, Save Money

By Mae Kowalke

TMCnet Associate Editor

 

Often, when telecom expense management (TEM) is discussed, the focus stays on finding and correcting billing errors. But that’s not all there is to TEM. Another important factor companies need to consider when looking for ways to reduce their communications costs is the business processes involved in selecting, purchasing, deploying, using and paying for telecom assets.

 

AnchorPoint, a company that provides full-lifecycle TEM services, recently released a new white paper (“Map-to-Win: A Strategic Approach to Telecom Expense Management”) that outlines the company’s focus on business processes across all aspects of TEM.

 

TMCnet spoke with AnchorPoint CEO David Olsson to find out more about the company’s approach to TEM, and why business processes are such an important element for success.

 

 

Olsson told TMCnet that Map-to-Win is a TEM approach focusing on the business goals of AnchorPoint’s clients.

 

“We seek to understand what they are trying to accomplish,” he said.

 

Olsson stressed that business goals, and the processes that underlie them, are vital to a successful TEM campaign; without that focus, managing telecom assets cannot be effectively achieved.

 

That may sound obvious, but it isn’t always because enterprises in different industries have different needs, so customizing a TEM solution means providing not just services but consulting as well.

 

An example industry is retail. For retailers, optimizing cost savings is vital. TEM, obviously, is  a part of that.

 

“They need to be low-cost providers,” Olsson said of retailers. “Cost savings is incredibly important to them.”

 

While retailers may manage cost savings well in some areas, communications assets may not be one of them because of the time-consuming and potentially cumbersome nature of the process.

 

Using the Map-to-Win approach, AnchorPoint can work with retail clients optimize their operational efficiency as it applies to the TEM processes, resulting in considerable savings not just from reduced bills but reduced overhead as well. This is done, Olsson explained, by helping the client gain necessary visibility and insight into their communications assets and how they’re managed.

 

Another example is the financial industry. Financial institutions, Olsson said, have a strong need to keep tabs on their retail operations. TEM consulting for such clients can include developing processes to ensure that the right equipment is available where and when it is required.

 

When financial industry companies do not have a handle on their telecom expenses, the cost and waste can be tremendous. This is especially true because such companies typically operate on very tight margins, so delivering services to customers is vital. Regulatory compliance, Olsson noted, is also a big issue for financial institutions.

 

Although Map-to-Win is now officially launched as a strategy, Olsson stressed that the underlying concepts are nothing new to AnchorPoint.

 

“We’ve always had this strategic orientation to focus on the needs of our customers first,” he told TMCnet.

 

 

AnchorPoint offers TEM services in two ways: software license (enterprise obtains software and performs its own TEM) and managed services (AnchorPoint manages the entire TEM process for the enterprise). Managed services include software hosting at AnchorPoint’s site, ordering, provisioning, dispute management, and payment.

 

“We do the whole order-to-pay lifecycle,” Olsson said.

 

At the core, he added, AnchorPoint's TEM services are about streamlining business processes to help enterprises save money on their communications assets. The processes companies use are extremely important. In some cases, AnchorPoint has helped enterprises simplify the TEM lifecycle from as many as a hundred steps to several steps.

 

A key issue for an efficient TEM system is making sure that, within the enterprise, the right people are in the right place at the right time. That’s key for efficient management, planning and optimization.

 

“We provide a roadmap to facilitate the management of all these issues,” Olsson told TMCnet.

 

 

Obviously, streamlining business processes is a key element of TEM. But just how important is TEM itself—what kind of impact does an efficient TEM system have on enterprises?

 

Olsson told TMCnet that, across all industries, enterprises today on average spend 50 percent of their IT budgets on communications/telecom assets. Half of a budget is a pretty big chunk; definitely big enough to take a look and catch any billing errors.

 

And, Olsson stressed, the error rate for communications/telecom billing is extremely high. One reason for this is the inefficiency often found at back offices of service providers, which are having to adapt quickly to new technologies and as a result may fall behind in terms of accurate billing.

 

“We’re able to help the enterprise align their services with their bills,” he said of AnchorPoint’s TEM services.

 

Another reason why TEM is even more vital today than in the past is that enterprises are spending more than ever on communications. The per-unit cost of communications devices and services may be lower than in the past, Olsson noted, but the overall cost has risen as communications systems have become more complex. As a result, CIOs and CFOs at enterprises often have a hard time tracking telecom assets and services.

 

Checking, bills, Olsson said, is not only a time-consuming process for enterprises, but in fact many companies don't perform TEM tasks at all. If you consider that a typical invoice may be 1,000 pages long, it's not hard to understand why companies balk at the task.

 

 

Because checking invoices by hand is such a time-consuming and cumbersome process, an automated system is vital, Olsson said. Automation, though, cannot be applied to all TEM tasks because 70-80 percent of bills are still delivered in paper format.

 

Olsson said that, in the 1990s, there was a movement in the industry to define an electronic data interchange (EDI) standard to enable streamlining of electronic billing. The problem, though, was that as communications convergence took off and the rate of technological change accelerated, it become very hard to adapt an EDI standard quickly enough to keep pace.

 

Another snag for EDI has been the consolidation of AT&T with other carriers—BellSouth (News - Alert), Southwestern, etc. Each of those carriers came with its own back office that used a different billing system. The offices are not bound by a common backbone, but instead use different coding methods.

 

Olsson did not express optimism that an EDI standard will be defined industry-wide anytime soon, which is why AnchorPoint's services include manual input of paper bills to the system as needed.

 

 

AnchorPoint’s current TEM portfolio was launched in 2004, with three major application suites:

 

1. Invoice management

2. Asset management and provisioning

3. Usage of investments

 

A fourth application suite, covering business analytics, was added in 2005. This includes feature such as dashboards and trend-lines that let companies spot key information quickly.

 

  

---

---