While Telecom Expense Management (TEM) has sold the promise of enterprise savings for decades, today’s industry needs to be more than a tactical, cost-cutting tool if it hopes to survive. Optimizing expenses shouldn’t be the only thing your Tem Solution can do…

Today’s communications environment is a complex mix of intertwined technologies, systems, and people – your TEM Solution needs a holistic approach that not only considers these elements, but delivers improvements where each is concerned.

Since when does TEM stand for technology expense management?

Recently, the acronym we all know and tolerate is being broadened from telecom to technology because this industry is evolving beyond its traditional fixed-line focus. Organizations need to manage devices, spend, and information in mission-critical competencies like mobility, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and cloud.

As your technology team expands to encompass these new innovations, TEM must match this explosive growth if it hopes to continue to deliver business value going forward. Whether you like it or not, wireline is quickly becoming a smaller and smaller piece of today’s enterprise Technology Management pie.

In fact, the Enterprise Technology Management Association (ETMA) has expanded its scope to include 10 key impact areas that today’s TEM solution providers must address. I’ll spare you the details of each impact area, but the important takeaway here is to remember is that TEM is your best chance to ensure efficiency and impactful ROI across the entire technology management environment.

What does TEM solution success look like today?

Thanks to all these changes, your enterprise needs to spend some time redefining what TEM solution success is. While it may look different from one enterprise to the next, doing three things can go a long way toward ensuring better business value.

Reject a reactive approach

Yesterday’s TEM was largely an on-premise response to your expense management challenges – making it a standalone product that failed to cooperate with other systems. While this approach may have worked in the past, it also meant you were managing spend from a reactive point of view.

What you and everybody else needs today is a fully integrated platform that makes it possible to manage spend in real-time – enabling streamlined processes and the potential to eliminate financial waste before bad decisions are made. A proactive and predictive TEM solution delivers scalability and flexibility to keep all technologies connected and optimized.

Ban tracking bundles

In the early days of TEM, service providers made it the standard to offer performance metrics within their own solutions. While convenient, this essentially meant the solution was grading its own effectiveness. Can you say conflict of interest?

Organizations like yours are finding it increasingly important to view technology expense management from an independent perspective. By implementing one of these solutions, you can govern performance more stringently, make your TEM partner more accountable, and more easily dispute any charges that seem out of the ordinary. This also saves time, allowing you to worry less about TEM tasks and focus more on your core competencies instead.

Alter expectations

The greatest challenge involved with TEM’s evolution is understanding what a more holistic approach actually means and does. A comprehensive, cloud-based approach often delivers new levels of freedom, efficiency, and security – but only if you embrace a new definition of what’s possible.

The next generation of TEM needs to focus on business operations, not simply saving money. Smarter decision-making capabilities and refined technology management practices set the stage for impactful improvements – meaning even the most effective TEM solution will fail to deliver business value if you’re not fueling a vendor’s roadmap with actionable feedback. Today’s TEM is a two-way street, and you need to have more ownership in technology management than ever before.

The evolution of TEM is exciting. Its future will deliver tremendous business value – as long as you have the expertise to move innovation forward.  Fortunately, AOTMP® 2020 has all the tools, strategies, and conversations you need to make that happen. Click the banner below to make sure you’re a part of TEM’s premier industry event!

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