What is Telecom Category Management?
If you are a business owner or a finance manager, you’ve probably heard the term “TEM.” But what you’re really seeking from your team internally is Telecom Category Management.
Defining Telecom Category Management
First and foremost, T-E-M stands for Telecom Expense Management. What is TEM 101? At its simplest and most legacy definition, a Telecom Expense Management system allows businesses to manage their invoice processing.
With Telecom Category Management, you are managing your entire Category not just whether your supplier invoices are received and are OK to be paid.
Telecom Category Management covers a broad range of activities and teams to manage across:
Request Management: managing internal demand associated with ordering new services across your IT and Telecom Category, removing old services or disconnects, and changes to existing services. This demand is fielded across engineering teams or network operation managers and requires an element of sourcing go to market procurement strategies with your suppliers to obtain the most viable solution for your business. Ensuring the right level of data is captured is key to your ability to obtain pricing, deliver the right services but also track and the ability to report on various provisioning metrics including but not limited to, order status, vendor due date, vendor Service Level Agreements (SLAs), provisioner performance and jeopardy status and store this information to build up your network inventory.
Inventory Management: The management of your IT Network infrastructure data. This source of data should be 1 – complete but 2 – accurate. Your inventory is the life line of your teams ability to perform effective category management and should house all data elements that make up your network footprint and end user devices and applications.
Contract Management: Commercial agreements which outline the relationships between your business and supplier provided services. Agreements that ensure the right safeguards are in place to govern the relationship, products and services you’ve implemented. Maintaining a pipeline of renewals both contractually and across your network inventory.
Cost Management: Validation and control over expenses ensuring the network inventory that you have in place is what you’re paying for. Disputing costs which are not correct and maintaining commercial cost competitiveness. Benchmark network costs ensuing alignment with the current market rates for similar services.
Network Management and Operational Performance: Maintaining service performance across your network infrastructure tracking key SLA and KPI metrics with an over arching goal of quality assurance.
With a IT and Telecom Category Management system, you can not only store but maintain your IT network infrastructure i.e. network inventory, hardware assets, supplier details, billing accounts, products, and contracts in one central location, ideally in the cloud so the information is accessible by many, in real time.
Business Intelligence: The ability to analyze data and develop strong, reliable reports is a critical element of Category Management. This involves comprehensive business intelligence and reporting capabilities in which Category Managers extract and summarize data from all aspects of the category e.g. inventory, provisioning, invoicing, contracts, etc. and summarize the information. This business intelligence enables category managers to make SMART actionable decisions across the category.
Just like ubiquitous CRM platforms such as Salesforce.com, a Telecom Category Management system is similarly built around people relationships, and your business network needs. And that’s exactly why it can be so valuable for a fast-growing business.
How does Telecom Category Management work?
As a business either with a domestic or international operated footprint you have offices. With multiple offices you have employees and customers. Yet, as your company grows, so does your IT operational requirements. This leads to IT network infrastructure, for example connectivity to connect your offices, branches, warehouses, customer locations, data centers. Providing mobile devices or mobile software across your employee base, hardware infrastructure, software, data centers, colocations, storage, power, etc. the list goes on. This in turn leads to suppliers, various products, rate types, spend and contracts and obligations. And a massive inventory of IT network infrastructure. Which all leads to complexity as the business network requirements and supplier relationships grow more sophisticated!
It’s not just a transaction between the buyer and seller. You start to manage a myriad of network inventory, across time, within each supplier you do business with. You need to share information across various teams within your own organization who are working to deliver a project or turn up a new network component or perform supplier management. A Telecom Category Management system can serve as a vital hub to manage the many projects and network initiatives that happen in a growing business.
How do you translate the many streams of data coming in from network engineers, project managers, finance, and procurement teams, into actionable business information?
A Telecom Category Management solution gives everyone across the business, including engineering, service delivery, finance, revenue assurance, and sourcing, a better way to manage the IT category, supplier relationships and interactions that drive success. With visibility and easy access to network inventory data, such as service IDs, cost information, service term start and end dates, product information, and location details, a Category Management system can give you a clear overview of your suppliers and network. With Temforce an easy-to-use, customizable application built to deliver transparency through dashboards and reports, you can see a 360-degree view of the Telecom and IT category, all in one place.
How Telecom Category Management Can Impact Your Business
For businesses, a Category Management system may simply help you put your data in the cloud, making it accessible in real time, across any device. But as you grow, Telecom Category Management can quickly expand to include more sophisticated features to help teams collaborate with colleagues and suppliers, and automate a lot of manual task like send orders directly from your Category Management system vs. sending manual emails, gather insights on project status in real time, and get a holistic picture of your business spend and network infrastructure in real time to optimize your costs or plan out your future state network.
Today growing businesses manage network connections and supplier information in a variety of ways. Some use old fashioned home grown access databases. Others store information on their personal computer drives which no other team members have access to. Others use Excel spreadsheets or Google documents. While that may help in the short term when you have a small team and don’t plan on scaling your business, if you want to scale for fast growth, it may be time to consider a Category Management system to help you collect your precious business data in one place, make it accessible via the cloud, and free up your time to focus on future state network goals rather than letting valuable insights and information fall through the cracks.
Though “TEM” systems have traditionally been viewed only as a way to validate and pay invoices by finance departments, network teams are seeing big benefits with an end-to-end Category Management platform like Temforce. For example, today’s sourcing teams have a wide variety of channels to choose from when procuring services with a supplier — they may start by sending and receiving a few emails or pull information across several system to gather requirements. A Category Management platform helps service teams, network engineers, and sourcing teams manage requests coming in through one automated channel without missing a beat.
Why You Should Get Started with Cloud-based Solution
It’s 2020, the idea of not being or using applications hosted in the cloud sounds like an ancient concept. By moving to the cloud from on-premise software, businesses are freed from the need to install software on every single employee desktop computer and mobile device at their organization worldwide. By moving data, software, and services into a secure online cloud environment, businesses can increase productivity, reduce cost, and increase scalability. A Cloud-based Category Management system means every user is working off of the same information, all the time — it’s automatically synced. Your employees and suppliers can collaborate from anywhere on the road that is able to instantly update information after a project implementation. Plus, there’s no hardware to set up or upgrade, keeping IT costs low.
Wondering if your business can benefit from a TEM system? Check out the new step-by-step guide, starting with Chapter 1: 6 Ways Telecom Category Management helps your business.