Single view reporting for optimal telecoms reporting

After decades of a telecommunications monopoly, and despite deregulation, the price of telephony in South Africa has skyrocketed. The issue has even drawn fire from the presidency of South Africa, via Thabo Mbeki who at the time complained that the high costs of telephony was deterring investors.

But despite complaints, Telkom's monopoly remains entrenched and while government and ICASA contemplate 'policy reviews', Alec Erwin contemplates becoming a self appointed SCM [second communications minister / the first one has not been very successful] by starting a new broadband operator to compete in the marketplace; it is left up to individual companies to explore methods of reducing their telecoms spend - a real challenge as telecommunications costs in South Africa are among the highest in the world, and businesses typically overspend by anything from 15 to 50 percent.

Customers are looking for new and intelligent ways to analyse and streamline their telecommunications spend. Recent requests for solutions include the Cape Town Unicity and Parliament. These are typical examples of BIG business shouting for help.

One of the major problems in terms of escalating costs is that most companies use a complex mix of traditional landline phones, their own WAN for Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP), different cellular networks and multiple cellular service providers, to deliver telecommunications to their branches nationwide. Furthermore, all these networks and SP's deliver invoices and itemised billing to the customers every month in disparate formats, to multiple postal addresses [or email inboxes] and no intelligence is applied to this billing data. So as time goes on, customers find it increasingly difficult to manage their costs as invoices and itemised billing become more and more unwieldy to consolidate.

The problem is that you cannot manage your costs if you cannot measure them. And even if you can measure these costs, with convergence of voice and data you need the skill set [and time] to implement change efficiently. There are companies in the market place charging small fortunes to perform telecoms audits for customers. Once complete, the customer then has to find a service provider to deliver the change required and then 12 months on, if the customer wishes to measure success, perform the whole complex costly exercise again.

The Nett result to customers is that more and more [customers] are asking for a single point of contact / or single view point into their telecoms expenditure.

Our belief is that customers need a solution that gives them a ‘Single View' into their telecoms spend, irrespective of supplier, and derived from source documents; ie the network or SP's monthly billing.

This ‘Single View' should provide insight into the opportunity available to them based on their actual business need and products in the marketplace. Examples would be existing call patterns / employees profiles / business processes and company strategy. Whilst defining the business need, the solution should take into account the customers geographical location, supplier invoices and supplier detailed billing, analyse the call patterns and then use this data to come up with an optimal telecoms plan.

Once the action plan is agreed, employees / consultants / service providers can then work together to implement the plan, manage the change and reporting will show the fruits of their labour. This is approach is very different to the current solution's out there, in that most solutions [TMS / Extension Reporting / Consultants] are able to provide reporting on a portion of their clients telecommunications needs, but not everything.

The results are that in nine times out of 10 opportunities will go begging. For example, a service provider of Least Cost Routing (LCR) services understands LCR, but generally they do not understand cellular handsets, PBX or VOIP. The same would be true for any service provider / solution / consultant who does not provide a complete offering to market.

So when choosing a solution to manage your costs, ensure that the solution reports on all TYPE's of expenditure [especially cell phones / 3G cards and wireless] and that all the role players in your company [Networks / SP's / Management / Employees / Suppliers] have instant access to data that is relevant to the role they play in your business, whether they are employees / management or suppliers. This ensures that everyone will know where to start, what to start with and what change to expect.

Peter Walsh_3rd June 2007 / http://www.dataroom.co.za/