What is TEM?

TEM 101

This is a simple definition of TEM:

Technology Expense Management (TEM) is a technology for managing all of your company’s IT network and interactions with internal teams and external carriers. The goal is simple: Improve business processes. A TEM system helps companies stay in tuned with internal teams demands, streamline processes, and improve transparency.

When people talk about TEM, they are usually referring to a Telecom Expense Management system, an application that helps with invoice processing. In addition to invoice management, TEM also helps with inventory management, contract management, MACD request management and much more.

A TEM solution helps you focus on your organization’s network infrastructure (i.e. telecommunication services which include data services such as MPLS, Leased Lines, Internet Connections, SDWAN, voice fixed lines PRIs, POTS, VOIP Channles, and usage, mobile devices and usage along with IT assets routers, firewalls, servers etc.) provided by telecom carriers and hardware providers – throughout your lifecycle with them, including procuring new services, managing inventory, invoice billing, support and maintenance.

Who is TEM for?

A TEM system gives everyone – from Procurement, IT Network Managers, Finance teams, Auditing professions, to IT Leaders a better way to manage the internal and external interactions and relationships driving harmonious processes and relationships to drive success. A TEM tool lets you manage and keep record of all move add changes and disconnect request and provides a centralized repository of your inventory and contractual elements which can be used for validating supplier invoices. This information in one central accessible location available to anyone at your company who might need it.

With visibility and easy access to data, it’s easier to collaborate and increase productivity. Everyone in your company can see your vital network information, understand your cost and effectively communicated with, what they’ve bought, when they last purchased, what they paid, and so much more. TEM can help companies of all sizes drive business growth, and it can be especially beneficial to a small business, where teams often need to find ways to do more with less.

Here’s why TEM matters to your business

Market and Markets (Gartner) predicts by 2019 the TEM is expected to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 16.1% from 2014 to 2019. If your business is going to be able to sustain this rapid growth you know that you need a strategy for the future. Your business has targets, business objectives and profitability plans. Building a reliable network that is built to handle your business demands is a vital component. Getting up-to-date, reliable information on your underlaying network performance and procurement can quickly lead to chaos. How does your team capture process and action the many streams of request coming in from project teams and engineering teams, manage network outages or validate your supplier bills?

A TEM system can give you a clear overview of your entire network spend, suppliers and network performance – everything in one place – a simple, customizable dashboard that can tell you your outstanding carrier order statuses, any open network outages and the services which are coming due for renewal in the next 30 – 60 days out and much more.

Your Finance team can even validate you’re your supplier invoices to ensure your network inventory cost and agreed contract rates are what you’re paying for. Sourcing and procurement teams can use a TEM solution to better understand the pipeline of contract renewals, benchmark your network costs and manage RFP’s. Some of the biggest gains in productivity can come from moving beyond TEM as an invoice validation tool and embedding it in your business to assist IT network management teams all the way through supply-chain management. A TEM platform lets you manage a pricing inquiry across internal and external channels with your carriers without losing track and gives your project teams, and carriers a single platform to communication across.

Running a business without TEM can cost you real money

On average by NOT having a TEM solution companies waste between 15-25% y.o.y. on their telecom networks. Teams spend more time focused on chasing for status updates, creating bespoke templates and processes, and searching for vital network information during network crisis. All too often this information gets stored in emails, bespoke spreadsheets, separate databases, file cabinets or simply just kept inside the heads of your team.

Don’t make tracking and managing internal projects harder than it needs to be. A TEM ensures your data is in one place and can easily be updated by anyone, anytime.

Details can get lost, project status are not followed up promptly and prioritizing projects can be a matter of knee-jerk reaction to being chased for status rather than a defined process workflow based on the actual facts. Things can quickly get out of hand the minute anyone goes on vacation or even worse leaves the team. However, it’s not just project management teams that suffer without TEM.

Your carriers may be asking you to submit orders into their portal. This can quickly turn into a swivel chair game of access multiple portals, sending emails, scanning documents and sending faxes to ask questions, following up on order status or to raise a ticket for outages. Without a common platform for carrier interactions, communications can be missed or lost in the plethora of information leading to slow or unsatisfactory response times.

Even if you do successfully collect all this data, you’re faced with the challenge of making sense of it. It can be difficult to extract intelligence. Reports can be hard to create, and they can waste valuable time. IT Leaders and Managers can lose sight of what their teams are up to, which means that they can’t offer the right support at the right time – while a lack of oversight can also result in a lack of accountability from the team.

What does a TEM system do?

TEM Workflow

A technology expense management (TEM) solution helps you manage your suppliers award business and keep manage the relationship to ensure your internal business partner is happy by organizing and managing the project information in a way that helps you build stronger relationships with them and grow your business faster. TEM systems start by collecting a project request requirements service details, capacity, location details, cost center and General ledger information all through a single entry. Standardizing It may also automatically pull in other information, such as recent news about the company’s activity, and it can store personal details, such as a client’s personal preferences on communications. The TEM tool organizes this information to give you a complete record of individuals and companies overall, so you can better understand your relationship over time.

A TEM platform can also connect to other business apps that help you to develop customer relationships. TEM solutions today are more open and can integrate with your favorite business tools, such as document signing, accounting and billing, systems, so that information flows both ways to give you a true 360-degree view of your telecom data.

And a new generation of TEM goes one step further: Built-in intelligence automates administrative tasks, like data entry and lead or service case routing, so you can free up time for more valuable activities. Automatically generated insights help you understand your customers better, even predicting how they will feel and act so that you can prepare the right outreach.

Here’s what cloud-based TEM offers your business

TEM and the cloud computing revolution have changed everything. Perhaps the most significant recent development in TEM systems has been the move into the cloud from on-premises TEM software. Freed from the need to install software on hundreds or thousands of desktop computers and mobile devices, organizations worldwide are discovering the benefits of moving data, software, and services into a secure online environment.

WORK FROM ANYWHERE.

Cloud-based TEM systems such as Temforce (Learn more: What does Temforce do?) mean every user has the same information, all the time. Your IT network teams search for vital data during times of crisis and receive updates instantly after your carriers provide outage updates, or teams can work from anywhere. The same information is available to anyone who needs it, from the sourcing team to the finance teams.

REDUCE COSTS.

TEM can be quick and easy to implement. A cloud-based system doesn’t need special installation, and there’s no hardware to set up, keeping IT costs low and removing the headache of version control and update schedules.

Generally, cloud-based TEM systems are priced on an insane ratio model but not Temforce. Temforce charges based the number of users who access the system. This can be very cost-effective in terms of capital outlay and is also extremely flexible — enabling you to scale up and add more people as your business grows.

A CLOUD-BASED TEM PLATFORM OFFERS YOU:

Faster deployment
Automatic software updates
Cost-effectiveness and scalability
The ability to work from anywhere, on any device
Increased collaboration

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