How to manage a Telecom Inventory

How should I capture and create and manage my telecom inventory?

Because of the lack of industry standards around how telecom inventory management records are created, many organization struggle to understand just how best to establish their own telecom inventories.

The foundation of establishing an inventory record always begins with a MACD (Move Add Change Disconnect) request.

In some shape or form your business had or will have a need for leased line, MPLS, mobile phone service or VOIP channel that required your procurement, service delivery or engineering team to order a telecom request with your carriers.

It’s at this stage that your request possibly has generated an internal task, project code ID or PO (Purchase Order) reference as well as when your carrier at some point generates a Service ID, Circuit ID or phone number associated with the request.

Let’s also not forget by the time the service is delivered, your Network Operation Center may use their own ID reference as well.  Without proper controls and communication across a wide number of teams what could be relativity process can quickly turn into a cluster —- that later turns into telecom auditing company’s dream.

As you create your own inventory management policy, by establish internal ground rules around what ID will be used as the Master ID.  Because of the domino effect on the amount of areas this impacts, i.e. Finance, network operations, procurement etc. someone (CIO, CFO, CPO) needs to make the call and establish a policy on how this will be done early on or at the very start of any inventory management creation project.

Nine times out of ten, the carrier ID or phone number is used as the master ID mainly because this will be can be used to validate your invoices when the carrier bill arrives.  Leveraging the carrier ID you can then establish your inventory and link your own internal references associated with MACD requests, project ID, etc. such that all teams can have a reference point back to their internal ID’s used.

With any strong solid inventory management foundation process standardizing how your data is captured, structured and updated will make or break your team when it comes time to validate an invoice, manage a network outage, produce reports or prepare for your next telecom RFP.

Inventory management is one of the key elements that Temforce is designed to manage in an automated way.

Read more about how temforce can help with your Inventory Intelligence –

Aten Hut – Inventory Intelligence 

Inventory Management and creating a centralised repository.

Temforce – Category Management SaaS enabling teams to manage their Telecom, IT Categories and Suppliers through 1 easy to use application.