6 Ways Telecom Category Management helps your business
Effective Category Management is key to your organization’s network health, network performance and your business’s ability to maintain operations so you need to manage them as efficiently and effectively as possible. Here’s how telecom category management technology can help you be more connected to suppliers, improve business performance, and transform your network, cost effectively and faster than ever:
1. Identify the right network solutions
“Without a Telecom Category Management solution, 77% of all sourcing and IT projects are maintained in spreadsheets and emails.”
You’ve spent time and resources working with the business and engineering teams to design IT solutions and source vendor quotes, but now what? Are the vendor proposals in line with engineering requirements, has diversity been checked, does the hardware BOM align to the VAR quote, has their line manager signed off on their mobile device? Time is of the essence when you’re a small or even large team with a lot of network activity, managing your MACD in email and spreadsheets is a total hack. Make the most of your Request Management activities— e-sourcing, track approvals, allocate costs and leverage automation — by simplifying them with a TEM platform. All teams engineering, sourcing, finance and network operations will have a complete view of Request MACD demand so they can create and engaging and have real time communications to transform your network and make key decisions faster.
2. Build more sustainable supplier relationships.
“Sixty percent of IT leaders say deeper supplier relationships are a key objective for sustaining a high performing network.”
Temforce, “STATE OF NETWORK PERFORMANCE”
Develop a deep understanding of an Enterprise’s Netowrk — beginning with a complete view of your IT Category and network performance across your supplier echo system — and you’ll build a strong supplier relationship founded on trust and mutual success.
Temforce can help an organization:
Explore their network performance challenges i.e. : Identifying looming network performance issues, order delivery bottlenecks, transparent billing and price performance metrics and having a trust worthy source of network inventory are some of the most important issues that IT Leaders are faced with daily.
Leveraging Temforce’s Supplier Relationship functionality suppliers are able to engage with their customers in real time through Temforce and have a single pane of glass view of outstanding orders, RFP’s provide order status updates.
With Temforce, businesses can be clearer about what matters — plan out their future state network goals, manage their employee corporate and BYOD mobile estates, IT network challenges, and network infrastructure preferences.
Track all Project Requests and every supplier exchange captured all the way through to delivery. Temforce’s built in Comments utility enables teams to “@” mention internal project team members or suppliers directly and record these notes in the app so next time you can pick up exactly where you left off with a quick review and go approach.
Engage with relevancy: After you understand your business requirements procurement teams have the e-sourcing controls to go to market in a strategic structure manner. Temforce is designed specifically to manage Telecom and IT services and structured to capture required information thus ensure any RFP or quote contains all relevant information to enable your carriers to not only provide pricing for the project but design a solution that meets the requirements outlined in within Temforce. This means no more wasted time on calls, chasing teams for information or frustrated that your supplier hasn’t listened. Temforce enables you to customize your supplier templates, manage your billing accounts, setup task reminders and track key KPI and SLA
3. Reduce the cost of your Telecom and IT Category.
“The probability of reducing your network cost by having a Telecom and IT Category solution in place is extremely high.The typical year 1 ROI savings is 20% through waste management clean up. The on-going year on year savings with effective and strategiccategory management ranges easily between 15%- 25%.”
THE KEY METRIC
Understanding your IT Network infrastructure and Telecom costs fully and having an automated way of keeping your inventory updated and correct is the key ingredient of continued effective category management. For most enterprises this is not easy. The good news is with Temforce now you can. Gain greater visibility into the network costs outliers, validate your supplier invoices and quickly plan out your pipeline renewal opportunities within your category portfolio and you’ll see an increase in repeatable savings. This is all thanks to the trust you have in the quality of your network inventory. Leverage this savings to build-out your internal business case to finally procure your future state network.
Average Percentage Improvements Reported by Temforce Customers
A TEM system can help you improve business performance by improving team efficiency: Prioritize projects and opportunities that are highly likely to convert and close based on customer interactions with your company.
4. Increase employee productivity.
Fifty-two percent of high-performing Telecom category managers identified themselves as power users who take full advantage of their companies’ TEM technology.
Adopting the right technology frees up your teams from process-heavy tasks and gives them more time to collaborate internally to focus on managing the category vs. wasted time chasing teams for missing or incomplete data. Manual operations like hunting for site address or contact information or entering data multiple times across multiple systems that can be automated or eliminated from telecom MACD related processes. Automation across request or inventory management will free your employees so they can spend more time talking to IT network teams about network transformation projects, establishing a new BYOD solution or a new voice LCR strategy that optimizes your voice network spend moving the needle for your business.
5. Offer better network service.
“Ninety-five percent of network operation teams would prefer to have just one correct source network inventory.”
TEMFORCE SURVEY RESEARCH
Even the best product is only as good as the data that is entered and whether teams have adopted the processes and application as a means to keep track of the inventory. Teams must actively make the choice to ditch the home-grown hacks and bad processes to manage their inventory. When your entire network team has immediate access to a valid reliable source of your complete inventory, everyone can quickly view service IDs, capacity bandwidth, service install dates, location information, device details, costs etc. A streamlined way to access your vital telecom and network infrastructure inventory builds trust and encourages your team to maintain the accuracy of the information.
Average Percentage Improvements Reported by Temforce Customers
Source: Temforce Relationship Survey conducted 2016–2017 among 200 users randomly selected. Response sizes per question vary.
6. Improve Network Performance.
“A 50-minute outage can result in business down time that could decrease profits by 25%–45%.”
Visibility across your network outages can help your network service delivery teams proactively address at-risk service issues and proactively identify network performance trends to fix network issues before they happen. With transparency into network outages histories, active tickets or open cases, you review pervious performance issues and reduce the amount of time to resolve current issues. A solution that requires mandatory outage information to be completed pays dividends for trending out network performance issues to identify way to improve your network.