Did you know that global technology spending had a four percent increase even amid the pandemic?
These numbers should not surprise you, especially since almost all businesses rely on technology and telecom to operate most of their functions.
Unfortunately, about 20 percent of the amount that companies spend on telecom is an unnecessary expense.
For this reason, spend analysis and telecom spend management are no longer luxuries but necessities for procurement teams.
This is because the solution to the overspent money in telecom is not just about cost reduction but also to monitor, control and optimize contract value with current suppliers.
Read on for more information on spend analysis and telecom spend management and how to gain more control and visibility on your telecom expenses.
What is spend analysis?
Spend analysis is the process of gathering, classifying, cleaning and analyzing data. These processes help control overall procurement costs.
Additionally, they help monitor compliance and boost the efficiency of the company’s spending. Through procurement spend analysis, companies can quickly identify potential telecom spend saving opportunities.
What is telecom spend management?
Telecom spend management is the practice of managing and optimizing a company’s telecom needs. It also involves monitoring the communication budget.
This is done by a third-party service like Thinking Machine which monitors and optimizes how the company spends on mobile, data, and voice expenses.
It helps identify possible overspending channels and minimize contract value leakage. Moreover, it maximizes the efficiency of the telecom processes.
How does spend analysis help in telecom spend management?
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is no better time than now to gain more control of your costs and unplanned budgets.
It is possible to save companies much-needed budget that may be lost in telecom spend through spend analysis and telecom contract value intelligence
Here are some ways through which spend analysis can help your telecom spend management
Helps reduce unnecessary costs
As mentioned earlier, most companies are impacted by unnecessary costs on technology and telecommunications spend.
Through spend analysis, it is possible to identify how budget allocated to telecom is spent. This makes it easy to identify the hidden and unnecessary costs incurred.
Spend analysis and telecom spend management involves verification of billing disputes, charges, and cost center allocation to help identify all costs in the telecom processes.
After identifying the unnecessary costs, you can eliminate them, thus creating more profit for the company.
You have streamlined operations
To help you optimize contract value, you may opt to try in-house spend analysis methods. However, although this may seem economical, it may end up causing more harm than good.
It will take time and resources to analyze spend accurately, dispute charges, manage inventory and communicate with current suppliers.
Handling each of these tasks alongside all other tasks in the business will lead to some mistakes, usually caused by not having a single view of all the right information.
By implementing a spend analytics solution you can save your procurement teams a lot time and optimize your spend quickly and more efficiently.
Additionally, you will teams will have more time to focus on other issues in the business, thus promoting growth.
You achieve better analysis
Spend analysis is an important part of any company as technology and telecom spend is typically a very complex spend category to manage.
Through predictive spend analysis, it is possible to discover more about your telecom spend management. You can gain a comprehensive analysis of data use, budget, profit, losses incurred and contract value optimization opportunities.
Better resource management
After gaining deeper analysis, it becomes much easier to tell how contracts should be optimized in the future. For instance, through spend analysis, you can quickly realize where current suppliers might be overcharging or you have under-utilized services.
With such information, you have a chance to better manage your supplier relationship and negotiate more accurate contracts, this is what we call spend decision intelligence.
Alter employee’s consumption behavior
Ideally, employees should be trustworthy and people who are focused on the betterment of the company. Unfortunately, that is not always the case, and telecom services can be misused.
Fortunately, spend analysis and spend intelligence can help you discover detailed insights about your telecom asset inventory at a micro level.
Identify areas of potential improvement
Spend analysis interrogates data in telecom spend management. Through this interrogation, it identifies gaps that need improvement.
This provides opportunities for more optimized spend that, in turn, benefit the business. For instance, through spend analysis, you can quickly understand your global telecom spend in a single view, giving you the same level of insight and optimization opportunities with suppliers in regions that may not fall under global telecom procurement agreements.
Using spend management intelligence can help drive consistency in telecom spend across your entire global supplier relationships.
Enterprises are impacted by up to 30% of contract value leakage in their telecom spend, you can efficiently identify opportunities that can help you reduce the overall amount you spend on telecom without continually changing suppliers.
Helps focus on the long term of the industry
Focusing and planning your company’s future helps maintain objective and goal alignment.
Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to plan the present without a guiding strategy, let alone the future.
For this reason, the results of spend analysis will help you take a more accurate data-driven approach to planning your technology and telecom spend. By adopting spend analytics you enable a real-time and always-on telecom audit process, you uncover hidden value which manual process wouldn’t find and you gain more spend visibility in a single global view.
Are you ready to implement spend analysis?
From the information above, it is safe to say that your business is missing out on a lot if you are yet to employ spend analysis in your business.
Your telecom spend management has a lot to benefit from through spend analysis, which is for the overall benefit of the business.
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