Having a company is a zesty and usually rewarding endeavor. It's actually running it that can be a pain. Think of Glenview-based Optelcon as the analgesic of the technology world, ready to take away all those headaches. The technology and services company develops and delivers solutions for the global corporate community. President and CEO Robert Pommer talks about efficiency, development, and taking off with travel.
Why do you think there's a need for your services?
Most major industry analysts have stated that virtually every corporation overpays their telecommunications bills by an average of 5 to 15 percent, due to billing errors. They also indicate that virtually every large corporation overpays an additional 10 to 15 percent, due to inefficiencies. Given that telecommunications currently is the 5th largest and fastest growing expense item on the average corporations expense line, the opportunity to reduce costs and increase efficiencies are enormous.
How is the company unique in the marketplace?
Optelcon is different in the market because we are an enabling technology company, not an audit company. We develop software and solutions for companies that enable both the low-tech auditing companies and the large enterprises to audit, optimize and create efficiencies to reduce their overall telecommunications expense.
How will this benefit your customers?
We enable companies and audit firms to go from getting paper invoices and to an electronic format, which lets companies slice and dice expenses by whatever criteria they choose. We enable the auditing and the management of recoveries for every line item of every bill, every month. We also enable the the user to not only get reports on cost, but to interact with the tool to make changes as situations arise, impacting their overall expense.
What are the largest challenges that you see in providing your service?
The flexibility of our product creates our biggest challenge in the sales process. However, it is also one of our greatest strengths. The software has over 60 different modules ranging from accounts payable/general ledger integration to provisioning, moves adds and change (MACD) management and integrated network monitoring and SLA management. Finding the right mix of services without "overwhelming" the customer has been our biggest challenge to date. The flexibility and the fact that we have a large development team makes just about anything possible. However, focusing on bite size pieces is tough to do at times.
Do you have anything in the works for the future?
We are in the process of getting ready to roll out our full international capabilities. Companies that have offices all over the world will be able to manage their global telecommunications like never before. We already have the language and currency conversion technology built and available today.
In addition, we are getting ready to roll out our Travel Module. Travel is one of the top expenses for large companies and we felt that it was the next logical thing to address. We will be the first company to link real time corporate card information with the corporate travel policies to give companies the ability to truly manage their travel spend. We are also continuing to develop and mature our existing shipping, healthcare, utilities, and property management modules.
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