Why you should be thinking about workflow management

Oftentimes when it comes to the topic of Telecom Expense Management a.k.a “TEM” it’s easy to view TEM software as only a software inventory system that allows an organization to validate inventory and pay an invoice. Whilst invoice validation is a key aspect of TEM, the next logical question should be “how do I ensure my inventory is correct when I process my invoice?”

From temforce’s perspective, the answer is through efficient workflow management controls.

Workflow management may not appear at first to be the most glamorous element of Telecoms Expense Management (TEM), but it’s certainly one of the most important.

In simple terms, get it right up-front and you’ll not just be significantly more efficient and save yourself and your company a lot of time, but you’ll be ahead of the game when it comes to managing your network.

No matter how big or small your company is, you need to be able to manage your entire TEM network inventory from beginning to end. This means controlling your moves, adds, changes and disconnects (or ‘MAC-D’, to use industry lingo) in order to streamline your processes and ultimately save your company time and money. That’s workflow management.

In any busy organization, you will be dealing with non-stop activity on a daily basis – business projects, programmes, network refreshes, and a million other issues that take place simultaneously. In order to keep track of that level of activity, you need to have a workflow management system in place, and here’s why:

• “It allows you to standardize the way that information is coming into the organization.”

This means ditching the spreadsheets and consolidating all your TEM data in one place, under one administrative system. Standardization will also avoid the tricky issue of duplicates, by preventing people from entering in free text fields – it is all too easy for one employee to type the wrong thing, or to type the right thing the wrong way (e.g. 111 8th Avenue vs. 1-11 8th Avenue vs. 111 8th Ave and so on….).

Once it has been implemented at the lowest level, these standardization processes can then be scaled up to incorporate reporting at the highest level – across your suppliers, your records, your regions, etc.

Without even trying, you will have essentially built an accurate database of your company’s historical inventory, which will be an invaluable tool when it comes to benchmarking and auditing.

• “It allows you to keep track of all your activity.”

Through workflow management, as soon as any information comes in, it is captured and archived instantaneously. Once you understand what the request is for, you can link it back with any relevant information (the project number; the client name; where the cost was booked to; etc.) so that you start to capture general information about your day-to-day operations.

Service details can also be tagged to offer further details on the sorts of services you’re ordering, what ports are being used at any given time, etc. Over time, this will help you to better understand your existing processes, and make improvements where they are needed, creating a slicker, more effective TEM process.

• “It allows you to keep track of all your actions.”

A good workflow management tool will allow you to store historic data on every action related to your TEM requests: what that request was for; who signed off on it; when it was received; when the service was delivered; and any updates associated with the installation. Any problems in your system can be quickly traced back to their source, and you will get a better sense of the available timelines and workload capabilities within your TEM team.

Having captured this information through workflow management controls, you will build a searchable, scalable database of your TEM activities and actions, which enables you to start identifying patterns of behaviour. For instance, maybe you always run out of a certain product towards the end of the month, or maybe you’re prone to more outages on a certain cluster of ports. By capturing these actions, you are creating a treasure trove of information that will allow you to go out into the market offering the best service you can possibly deliver.

As a Temforce customer by leveraging our workflow management controls when someone asks you “How do I know if my invoice is okay to pay?” you can smile and respond with confidence or better yet, refer them to the request workflow within the invoice validation system so they can see for themselves.

Do you struggle with Inventory Management? Then don’t miss our post “Inventory management and creating a centralised repository”. 

Temforce is a provider of Telecom Category Management SaaS enabling teams to boost their Telecom Management!