1. Telecom project manager: Assumes total responsibility for contract management. Acts as primary interface with the carriers to present problem issues, coordinate solutions, and manage corporate manpower dedicated to telecom contract services (salary: $65K to $80K).

2. Telecom billing analyst: Reviews telephone bills on a monthly basis and identifies carrier billing errors, presenting the necessary information to the carriers to obtain credit against the billed amount (salary: $50K to $60K).

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

3. Voice manager: Manages voice contract administration, coordination of moves/adds/changes, handling of trouble tickets, and coordination of company resources and manpower to assist carrier personnel in correction of network problems (salary: $35K to 50K).

4. Data manager: Manages data contract administration, including moves/adds/changes, trouble tickets, and network troubleshooting. Capable of working with carrier personnel to identify and correct real network problems (salary: $35K to $50K).

5. Telephone analyst: Works with corporate users assisting them with identifying and defining their telephone requirements and then translating this into a move, add, or change order (salary: $35K to $45K).

6. Data analyst: Works with corporate users, assisting them in identifying and defining their data requirements and then translating them into carrier move, add, or change orders (salary: $35K to $45K).

For many enterprises, the functions of voice and data analysts are combined into one position (telecom analyst), making $25M of telecom spending the floor at which an enterprise could afford FTEs for most of the positions previously described. At less than $25M of telecom spending, enterprises have to make hard decisions about FTE coverage areas. Because billing analysts can generally pay for their own salary and benefits from savings they recover (from telecom billing errors), most enterprises have billing analysts.

Understaffing means lost savings opportunities, resulting in higher real cost for services. Without proper staffing, costs will not be monitored properly, meaning charges may be paid for circuits and services that do not exist (for example, cell phones for terminated employees, phones in empty offices, and data circuits that connect to nowhere). Enterprises might also be overpaying on circuits that should have been downsized or combined with other circuits, and so on.

The case for outsourced telecom portfolio management

Enterprises that switch from internal telecom contract management to telecom portfolio outsourcing recover the cost for internal staffing (which is no longer needed) and still yield 5 to 7 percent real savings. This represents savings that are slightly (2 to 3 percent) better than using internal staffing for the same functions.

Outsourcing also has other intangible benefits, including the following:

• Increasing the accuracy of the circuit inventory, which saves money by making requests for proposal cheaper and easier to prepare, and eliminates the need for costly circuit inventory audits
• Reducing the cost for preparing annual pricing benchmarks (included in many telecom agreements) and yielding better price adjustments, averaging 5 to 10 percent better than those secured by internal teams
• Making network architectural reviews cheaper and easier to conduct by qualified third parties
• Providing professional contract negotiations where paid professionals, rather than internal staff members, represent the enterprise at the negotiating table, again yielding additional savings of (10 to 15 percent)

Bottom line: Users should retain professional portfolio management services or employ internal contract management teams to hold down costs. Companies spending $5M to $10M should consider outsourcing only contract management functions.

The Cost of Managing Telecom Agreements (Impact: US)
First published on August 20, 2002
By Don Carros

What made your company seek outside help to manage its telecom systems? TalkBack below or e-mail us with your thoughts.

Previous page |   1 2

		ARTICLES  Special Report: VoIP--Time to retire your PBX  Protect your telecom service  VoIP--do it right  Weathering telecom storms  Telcos back on top		PRODUCTS  CiscoWorks VoIP  Lucent MultiVoice VoIP  NetIQ Chariot VoIP Assessor  IBM WebSphere Voice Response for AIX2
		Visit the Networking Update Center

Newsletters
	Tech Update Today eBusiness Update Tech Update Weekly	Linux Update Security Update Windows 2000/XP Update		All newsletters FAQ Manage my newsletters

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

[an error occurred while processing this directive]