Technology Expense Management vs Telephone Management Services

Back in 2017, we wrote a blog post about how telecoms expense management (TEM) has evolved. Starting out as a simple solution to manage costs, this post explained that modern TEM solutions are more comprehensive today because telecoms environments have become increasingly complex.

Today, we’re looking at a few of the differences between more traditional telephone management services (TMS) and the future of managing and monitoring solutions – technology expense management.

Here are the basics.

Telephone management services

A Telephone Management System, an app or web service that connects to a business’ existing telephone system and makes it possible to keep track of your company’s telephone usage and expenditure.

A TMS helps a business to:

• Reduce abuse of telephone systems, like extensive private calls.
• Better plan, budget and make infrastructure-related decisions.
• Ensure provider rates and billing are accurate.
• Monitor usage between different users, departments and branches can be monitored so that accurate projections can be made and budgets allocated accordingly
• Assess service levels, such as answer times, dropped calls and average ring times.

Technology expense management

Today, TEM is used to refer to technology expense management, as it moves beyond just telecoms. Why is this the case? Well, because modern businesses need a solution that monitors everything from inventory management, sourcing and procurement, service fulfilment to expense management, enterprise mobile environment and business data insights. As more and more technologies and collaboration tools make their way into the enterprise, businesses need improved visibility of their full IT environment, including everything from IT asset tracking to cloud consumption monitoring.

In essence, a good technology expense management solution does three simple things for a business – saves time and money and allows you to better track your entire technology stack.

This is particularly important in the era of cloud. Most businesses understand the value of cloud and are plotting their migration – or have migrated certain business functions already – but the cloud is only really effective when you can manage your consumption. With a technology expense solution you’ll easily be able to identify any cloud services you’re being billed for but no longer use. In the same way that a traditional telephone management system would manage multiple phone lines, a technology management system tracks a multi-cloud environment.

Similarly, as more and more companies outsource their business functions to external service providers, there is an increased need for visibility and control over the actions of these outside parties. This is where it becomes important to integrate your technology expense management solution with a vendor’s Service Request System, so you can do everything via a single portal.

While no business can predict the future, all businesses must be mindful that there will be changes to the technology landscape in years to come. With OneView, our technology expense management platform, keeping track of all of this technology is a whole lot easier. Keen to find out how? Complete the form below and we’ll be in touch.