The Misconceptions of Wireless Management Part 1: WEM vs. TEM

By Stefanie Mosca, TMCnet Managing Editor

If you are a veteran of the telecom industry, you are no stranger to the task of telecom expense management (TEM) to control your telecom costs among each and every employee’s phone system. However, whether you are willing to accept it or not, while TEM is still very important for businesses, the wireless evolution that has swept in is creating a new level of expense management that requires a different set of deployment and administration tools.

It’s easy to assume that TEM and WEM go hand-in-hand, and while they do, the well-known way of handling TEM clients has created a misconstrued perception of what wireless management actually requires and entails. SMBs and enterprises alike will be surprised to learn that the truth behind what wireless expense management really involves could be saving them quite a bit of money and headaches on their wireless bills each month.

So let’s first distinguish between the two. Telecom expense management (TEM) encompasses a number of different business processes, including the sourcing of telecommunications services; the ordering, provisioning and support; inventory management to track all telecommunications services; invoice management to pay and track financial documents; usage management to track usage against billed services; dispute management when erroneous charges appear on a bill; and business intelligence to track overall TEM program results and reporting.

However, wireless expense management (WEM) encompasses and controls the wireless spending of each employee’s mobile device, a task that is much more intricate than TEM, given the wireless processes necessary today.

The language that wireless bills are in is hard for any general user to decipher, let alone someone with wireless management experience. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could hire a company to decipher and maintain your wireless management for you? And, with this insight, you can more easily focus on wireless management as you gain an understanding of how employees are using their wireless tools, as well as the ability to identify those critical problem areas that must be addressed.  OneCall Manage provides a SaaS (News  – Alert) solution that digs deeper into wireless bills to reveal elements that can’t normally be tapped into at the surface level. OneCall’s service provides reporting capabilities including information necessary to drive down costs; these reports aggregate information across carriers providing inventory information that carriers do not deliver.

To drive effective wireless management, it is critical that wireless devices are not viewed as just a business expense. OneCall Global has created Business Intelligent software that provides visibility and insight into wireless user behavior, and enabling data driven-decision making.  The company’s wireless expense management solution provides proactive management of your entire mobility lifecycle across the enterprise, as well as visibility that extends beyond your devices and into the network.

Stay tuned to the Wireless Management Channel, exclusively on TMCnet, as we explore a series of articles over the next couple of weeks investigating the misconceptions of wireless management. Learn how a lack of knowledge in this area could be negatively affecting how companies handle their wireless management and how companies like OneCall Manage’s unique WEM solution digs deeper into wireless accounts to save money and simplify the overall wireless expense process.

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Stefanie Mosca is a Managing Editor for TMCnet. Previously she worked as a freelance copy writer for Digital Surgeons LLC. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from Quinnipiac University and a bachelor’s degree in communication from the University of New Haven. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Jamie Epstein