Whilst there’s no denying that an effective mobile procurement project can generate significant cost savings, many mid market and large enterprises miss out on 20% or more in additional cost savings by failing to review other activities that can quickly reduce mobile costs.
In this quick guide I’ll highlight three additional steps that your business can adopt to release valuable budget and in the process also free up your IT team for more strategic projects.
Step 1: Take control with a Mobile Expense and Usage Management Plan – many businesses fail to proactively take ownership and control of their business mobile service charges and usage. As a result, it’s not uncommon to find that 10-15% of business mobiles are simply never used or that network billing is consistently inaccurate. Furthermore when it comes to user behaviour, businesses often fail to challenge uncontrolled data usage or even identify regular roaming bill shock – much of which could be quickly removed or brought under control with the right strategy, processes and tools.
Step 2: Adopt the right mobile technologies and services – whilst it may seem logical to look for a ‘one size fits’ all solution when it comes to mobile services and there are undoubtedly benefits from having a single contract, supplier and tariff for all users and devices, this approach can also hide significant wastage and overspending.
In most businesses, a small group of VIP’s and high volume mobile users (normally 1-2% of users) often account for 20% or more of the overall mobile costs. These ‘power’ users have usage profiles and requirements that typically don’t align with the commercial terms and services that you negotiated for the bulk of your users; and that in turn can lead to large levels of overspending that could be avoided by tailoring mobile services for these users.
When it comes to mobile data, many large enterprises (especially those in professional services and finance sectors) also fail to consider how they could deploy different mobile network technologies like Machine 2 Machine (M2M) or IoT (Internet of Things) mobile services, private mobile networks and unified communications to improve productivity, security and to also reduce mobile costs.
With a little planning and selective use of different technologies, your business could quickly reduce roaming costs, provide more effective solutions for VIP’s and for users with high levels of data usage and with the right device strategy you could also tackle the growing challenge of increasing mobile handset costs.
Step 3: Control how you deploy and manage mobile services and technologies – many IT teams struggle with the day to day management of mobile networks services and device administration. In many cases, already over-stretched IT teams are approaching mobile management as a series of ad-hoc reactive support requests or tickets that often disrupt other planned activities. What’s more, a lack of appropriate tools and processes often means that IT teams can spend a disproportionate amount of resource manually configuring devices or reviewing mobile data usage records instead of proactively managing mobile as a a joined up ‘lifecycle’ service.
Through simplified technologies, deploying the right support model and deployment tools and by outsourcing aspects of day to day mobile administration, your business could quickly release significant IT resource for more strategic projects whilst also further reducing your mobile network and device costs.
To learn more visit us at www.utelize.co.uk or contact us at hello@utelize.co.uk to arrange a discovery call.
