Non-disruptive WEM the key to high ROI
It is obviously most important to save money when business requirements are growing faster than resources. This is the current case with wireless telecom. Usage is growing for a variety of reasons. People are practically living on their cellphones and smartphones. We are asking every individual to be more productive, because we’re not increasing our organizational headcounts. Plus, we’re all experiencing “cell first” syndrome—because people know they’re more likely to just get our voicemail if they dial our landlines.
But we can’t afford to have our monthly wireless invoices to grow at the same rate as our usage. So we want to use wireless expense management (WEM) to keep our bills under control.
Unfortunately, the same resource constraints that make us want to cut our phone bills so badly can also keep us from adopting WEM. After all, who can afford to go through a complex, time- and resource-intensive WEM implementation when we have too much on our plates as it is? And who wants to take the risk of prioritizing a WEM implementation—only to find out at the end of an expensive three- or four-month ordeal that the cost reductions we’ve achieved were not really worth the investment of time and money?
The answer: Nobody.
That’s why one of the keys to WEM success is automated, non-disruptive implementation. It doesn’t matter what kind of results might possibly lie at the end of a WEM implementation if that end is too far away and too hard to get to. It has to be fast and it has to be easy.
Put another way, I’d rather save 14% on my phone bill in two weeks than save 22% on my phone bill never.
However, we should also make it clear that simplified, non-disruptive WEM solutions (including cloud-based WEM-as-a-service offerings) are not automatically less effective than more ponderous WEM technology when it comes to discovering opportunities for savings. The effectiveness of any WEM solution is tied to its analytic algorithms. From a technical perspective, these algorithms are independent from the solution’s data capture mechanisms.
So, on one hand, you can have a conventional WEM solution that’s slow and difficult to implement—but still doesn’t deliver results that are very different from its competitors. On the other hand, you can have a WEMaaS solution that’s completely non-disruptive to your current operations—but, thanks to its back-end algorithms—yields especially high savings.
That’s why I strongly recommend you make ease of implementation your primary consideration when evaluating WEM solutions. Investing a lot to save who-knows-how-much-and how-soon just doesn’t make sense in today’s economy. Cutting your monthly bill with a few conversations and a handful of keystrokes does.
