As telecommunications become more complex so does the process of managing it.

There are many facets to managing telecom services within an organization including:

• Moves, Adds Changes and Disconnects "MACD"
  
• Collecting and reviewing invoices for accuracy
• Coding and paying invoices on time
  
• Departmental cost allocations and accounting
  
• Inventory management
• Technical design, optimization and management of networks
• PBX phone system management
• Mobile device management

Many of these functions are extremely time consuming and cost companies hundreds of millions of dollars to manage. Creating a comprehensive strategy for managing and controlling these expenses is critical to the financial performance of any organization.

By utilizing business process management services, companies can save a significant amount of money and focus on more core business functions.

Business process management companies, create fine tuned process machines for managing these processes. As a result, process costs drop dramatically with a substantial increase in quality. This is all they do.

There are several models for these services:

Complete Outsourcing: This involves turning over the entire management of your telecom spend to another company. This allows a professional management company to essentially take ownership of your network. They become responsible for paying vendors, optimizing services and provide your company a single point of contact and a single invoice.

Back Office Support: This model enables companies to maintain full control over their network, vendor relationships and spend. Through this model, certain time consuming processes are done by a third party. These types of back office service include things like consolidating all telecom information into to management reports, auditing invoices and managing the dispute resolution process with vendors. This pushes the bulk of the "grunt" work to a more cost effective solution while maintaining complete control.

There are a number of companies that provide these types of services, some offshore and some locally. There are pro's and con's to both. If you have never worked with an offshore company, consider that there are challenges. There are language, communications, network, timezone and other issues which, if not properly managed, can erase any cost savings.

U.S. firms, can typically provide better local support, but can be expensive due to the labor costs in the U.S.

The Ideal solution is to find a company that can provide all of the customer support and interaction locally, but manage offshore resources. This best of both worlds approach gives you the cost advantages without having to deal with the offshore challenges.

Bob Pommer
CEO
Optelcon.