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Customer Testimonial:
"
We thought we had a pretty good handle on our telecom infrastructure and billing. Even so, Total Solutions Group identified 15 separate savings opportunities totaling 20% of our annual spend or over $147,000."
--CFO, Multi-State Property Management Company
 

 April 2004  

Volume 2, Issue 4  

Planning Your 2004 Telecom Budget
Tips You Need To Know, Before You Do!


Audit Just One Piece
Of Telecom Savings Pie

Total Telecom Cost Management (TTCM) is more than hiring auditors for billing error refunds.

To lower costs, you must attack them at their source, in a "proactive" fashion. "Reactive" after-the-fact solutions, such as audits, are far more costly and ultimately less rewarding from an ROI perspective. And we say that even though we perform audits for many of our clients!

AberdeenGroup and Gartner Dataquest, the leading analysts on telecommunications, both agree that telecom costs can, and must, be driven down. We agree with them, and that's why we work to reduce ALL of the unnecessary costs associated with telecom. Keep in mind that the majority of unnecessary costs will never be recovered. Once paid to the carriers, those dollars are gone forever.

An Integrated Effort

Managing telecom networks for maximum performance and minimum expense are not independent activities. Unless the two objectives are pursued in tandem, pushing for results on one side can negatively impact the other. A unified "Total Telecom Cost Management" (TTCM) approach keeps both performance and cost in mind at all times.

TTCM can be likened to a five spoke traffic circle.

Where you enter the circle depends on where you are coming from, and how far you travel around the circle depends on where you need to go. The framework for TTCM is simple:

Network Insure that the right technology and services are in place to deliver the performance your enterprise demands.
Procurement Acquire these services under the most favorable terms.
Billing Accuracy Insure that you are being charged correctly per your contracts, USOCs, tax status and applicable tariffs and/or service guides.
Invoice/Service Management Drive out all unnecessary costs and wasted time related to managing your network inventory and the business side of telecom operations.
Information Reporting Provide everyone with a vested interest in telecom from a technical or financial perspective with access to the information they need for budgeting, planning or network controls.

Simple isn't it? Yet few companies can truly claim to be successfully performing these functions within an overall telecom management strategy. As one telecom expert states, "Every unnecessary payment going to the telcos is like making them a donation. And they aren't my favorite charity."

Entering The Circle

As with cars on the road, you can enter a traffic circle from any direction. We encourage you look at your needs, both immediate and long-term, for guidance on what cost management issues to tackle first. Here are some scenarios that might sound familiar:

  • A data-heavy financial company needs a network analysis, but there isn't time to get it done before a contract for data services comes due. So, we attack the contract first, making it as flexible and supportive as possible of network changes that are likely to take place in the coming year. When the network is addressed at a later date, at least the customer won't be boxed into using a set of services it no longer wants or needs.

  • A holding company is having problems managing the business end of its telecom services. Cost allocations, cost center approvals and AP/GL issues are driving them crazy. They need to get this automated first. They can deal with their networks and contracts later.

  • A pharmaceutical company has concerns about the validity of their bills. They have contracts expiring in 6 months and are prepared to change vendors due to the problems. They need an audit to quickly find and quantify all errors under this vendor so they can be settled while they still have negotiating leverage.

  • A large sales and marketing company has over 1,000 cell phones. It's a primary cost category for them in telecom and they have lost control. They need wireless management right now since their unnecessary costs can never be recovered by an audit.

TTCM defines best-in-class telemanagement. If your goal is leadership in this critical area (and we assume it is), keep in mind that it can't happen until you and your team take action. If you're ready, we'd like to learn about your needs, and whether we can help you in the same way we have helped other businesses.

Consultation With Experts

Nobody likes a sales call, including us. We think that an enterprise telecom professional should be talking with a peer expert, not a salesperson. That's why we make our senior telecom professionals available for informational conferences with interested companies, rather than our sales team. Just to talk telecom, not to sell. We learn about you. You learn about us.

To arrange a conference, please contact Amber Dufrene, our VP of Business Development today. She will personally set up a meeting with one of our senior team members to discuss telecom management issues. Amber can be reached at 877-455-3074 by email at director@totalsolutionsgroup.org


Total Solutions Group Saves the City of Saginaw over $193,000 annually!
For more details on how we did it...call us and we'll come and tell you how in less than 30 minutes!

Join our Growing List of Satisfied Clients
City of Saginaw, Detroit Diversified Educational Services, Freeland Public Schools, Wirt Financial Services, Carrollton Public Schools, Harrison Public Schools, Mid Michigan District Health Department, Central Michigan Hospital, CMU, McDonald Auto Group, Keystone Property Management, Saginaw Transit Authority (STARS), YEO & YEO CPA's and many more! We've eliminated over $500,000 in Telecom expense this year!

Our Contingency fee based services bound us to doing what's best for you!
Nextel retains top slot in survey
Nextel retained the #1 position in the Technology Business Research's Quarterly benchmark of US mobile operators for the 3rd consecutive Quarter. 

Nextel and Verizon (2nd) are the two mobile operators that distinguish their operations from the pack.

Now everybody wants to offer VOIP!

Qwest Jumps into VoIP Market Qwest said yesterday it has begun offering VoIP services to some customers in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, according to The Boston Globe.

The company said it will eventually expand VoIP service throughout its territory sometime next year. "The future of voice communications will be based on the Internet," Qwest's CEO Richard Notebart said.

AT&T to Launch VoIP Service
AT&T is expected to announce today that it will launch VoIP service in over 100 markets in the next two years, according to the Wall Street Journal. The company said it will start with three markets on the East Coast and also expand existing programs for business customers who rely on VoIP. The company said VoIP service will save it $10 billion a year by enabling it to bypass the Baby Bell's networks. "VoIP is the most significant, fundamental new technology shift in telecommunications in decades, and will deliver value to all customers," the company said in a statement.

Case Study: Driving Down
Wireless Costs

In April, 2003 the telecom administrator at a medical equipment manufacturer was tasked with trimming $100,000 from the annual telecommunications budget. He assumed this process would require him to evaluate the entire spectrum of telecom spend, and decided to start with the company's 400 cell phones.

But how? He knew that they were likely spending too much on wireless but he didn't have an internal option to resolve the problem. Whatever thinking had led them to this situation needed to be "rethought". It was time for automation, and help from the outside.

That's where the CellAssess application capability came in. Within days of deployment, rate plan optimizations and abusive-user savings opportunities were identified. Real savings of $25 per phone and $10,000 per month were being captured by August. And those are net savings, after paying the costs of this solution!

CellAssess isn't just a one-time correction tool, it provides ongoing wireless management capability. So building upon the initial savings, the client continues to receive incremental monthly savings by enabling managers to closely monitor spending while providing automated rate plan recommendations.

We encourage you to consider CellAssess when rethinking your wireless management plan. The savings opportunities are significant, and the reduction in administrative effort will make this challenging task a whole lot easier.

A Recent CIO Poll Reveals Interesting Facts

During October 2003, the CIO Magazine Tech Poll panel projected IT budgets to grow by 6% over the next 12 months, relatively unchanged from last month's results (5.9%). 

* The percentage of CIOs planning to increase spending on telecom equipment was 37.2%, an increase over last month (33%) and the highest increase in 26 months. 

* Security software continues to be the strongest sector in the poll with 57% of respondents planning to increase spending (versus 61% in September).

* A special question was asked this month about the level of priority that business continuity/IT disaster recovery services expenditures will receive next year. 21% of panelists indicated that it would receive zero-to-low priority, 51% indicated it would receive medium priority, and 27% indicated that it would receive high priority.

Total Solutions Does It Again
“Until Total Solutions Group performed their audit of our long distance charges, we thought our vendor-provided billing CDs gave us all the information we needed to validate our charges.  It turns out that some critical call type categories were not broken out on the CD, nor provided for in our contracts, and we were being stuck with ridiculously high rates that were hidden from us.  With sizeable new discounts on these call types, we will save many thousands every month.”

IT Director, Mid Michigan Hospital

Another Success Story!
“Due to significant transitions in our facilities, coupled with telecom personnel changes, we weren’t able to properly reconcile active circuits with billing. Total Solutions Group identified over $20,000 per month in unused connectivity which we cancelled within days, generating considerable immediate savings.”

VP Finance, Michigan Banking Group

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