Inventory management and creating a centralised repository

We’ve already discussed the importance of standardizing your processes through workflow management. But there is another crucial element to efficient, cost-effective telecoms expense management: inventory management.

First of all, it’s worth noting that the term ‘inventory’ does not just refer to the physical lines which make up your telecoms network – it also includes your vendor contracts. This is a small point, but a vital one.

If you are judging your inventory only on physical components such as point-to-point leased lines, MPLS ports, and VOIP Channels, you are potentially undervaluing your network. After all, each of these physical parts represents months of benchmarking, negotiating, and relationship-building with any number of vendor services.

If you want to create a central repository of your inventory, then your supplier quotes, internal approvals and last but not least, your vendor contracts cannot be overlooked.

The core challenges of inventory management

Inventory management is not as easy as it sounds – any TEM professional will tell you that! But there are really only two core challenges:

1.  Maintaining a centralised component

If you are on top of your workflow management, this will be easy. By maintaining an up to date record of your ‘MAC-D’ (moves, adds, changes and disconnects), you will have all the information you need to maintain a comprehensive, centralised inventory.

The key aspect to maintaining your inventory is to make sure that your inventory is linked into to your workflow management system, so that any MAC-D changes are automatically updated and reflected in your central inventory view as the request is completed within the request workflow.

It can take a huge manual effort to hope that someone remembers does their job and keeps the inventory updated, which is why temforce disabled the ability for someone to manually add new inventory or disconnect existing inventory in temforce. Within temforce, unless a request has been raised within the workflow, the inventory cannot be disconnected, upgrades, moved or changed.

2.  Keeping your invoices up to date

Invoice validation is a major challenge for many TEM teams, as there are so many elements which need to be kept up to date. However, if managed correctly your cache of invoices will be able to fill in any gaps in your inventory records, and take the guesswork out of your reports.

Again, this can be a time-consuming task if performed manually, but a good software solution will be able to automate this process so that all your invoices are properly archived, updated and linked back with your centralised repository.

Why do you need a centralised repository?

At its most basic, inventory management enables you to keep track of your existing assets, contracts and spending activity. But by centralising your inventory data and linking it with good workflow processes, you are potentially sitting on something much more valuable.

Every time a piece of information is sent from a request or via your MAC-D workflow control, the inventory repository is automatically updated. You will then start building a detailed archive of all your moves, changes, disconnects, purchases, and payments, as well as the dates and timings of every action. This will allow you to pull any volume of historical data out of your system at a moment’s notice and most importantly, referenced to a particular point in time.

Centralised inventory management can also help you to understand the total cost of your system. You can track inventory relationships as they relate to ‘parent and child’ circuit IDs – including cross-connects, local loops and total circuit connections – which offers a more complete picture of the actual system that you are paying for. By tracking these relationships, you for example, will also be able to identify and understand the cause of any outage, and repair the system more efficiently.

Your centralised repository will also allow you to sort through your active inventory in terms of supplier relationships, so that you know where your most valuable contracts lie, and how each vendor is performing on a historical basis.

In TEM, information is your friend. But it means nothing unless you can use this information to tell you something new about your network. By keeping a scalable and detailed repository you are allowing yourself the opportunity to build a unique record of your inventory activity, which will only become more valuable over time.

Do you struggle with Inventory Management? Then don’t miss our post:

“Inventory management and creating a centralized repository”. 

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