As large corporations are faced with the challenge of continually updating technology while still managing expenses, equipment maintenance, and maintaining their bottom line, Technology Expense Management (TEM) is a valuable tool that addresses these needs. Providing greater visibility into technology inventories and optimizing efficiency though automation, TEM allows organizations to track their technology and gain more in-depth insight into their IT assets and services.

The challenge of finance and IT departments resolving the issue of technology updates can lead to expensive manual overhead, poor data visualization, and slow response times—particularly with the added obstacle of managing mobile devices. Because today’s business model gravitates around a mobile-dependent workforce, hundreds of devices and applications require management and collaboration between multiple departments within the organization.

TEM services act as an automated liaison between these groups. By utilizing technology expense management, businesses can maintain an actionable record of all their technological assets and services. TEM is also able to work with all facets of technology, including acquisition and deployment, managing contracts with providers, monitoring usage, bill payment, maintenance throughout its life cycle, to when the asset is eventually replaced.

Additionally, enterprises are able to work more efficiently in centralizing and simplifying complex tasks through:

• Automated invoice audits
• Business intelligence with advanced reporting and analytics
• IT asset management
• Inventory management that includes change control and compliance tracking
• Procurement of order management
• Employee expense management

With a lack of an organizational system, collecting data from all of these sources in an attempt to analyze it with specific standards is labor-intensive and time-consuming. This poses the risk of broken and inefficient workflows which eventually leads to costly errors, resulting in inaccurate forecasting and even service outages when bills are delinquent.

Utilizing TEM, businesses automate these workflows, increasing speed and accuracy and giving companies an advantage in today’s marketplace. Auditing invoices with configurable audit rules can also be automatically created, allowing for the simplification of IT and finance processes and operations. The usage of advanced data analytics allows users to understand, interpret, and utilize data to make sound operational decisions. Businesses can streamline order fulfilment, auditing, payment processing, and asset management through the features provided by TEM. Security is also enhanced as TEM provides companies with the ability to create security and compliance policies that fit the company needs.

In today’s workforce, companies are facing a need to deploy larger and more complex mobile environments to support remote operations. This requires more complex management strategies to keep pace with the client and market demand. The mobility challenge continues to grow, affecting components of an organization all the way from IT, to finance, and end users. If the right solutions are not available, managing those mobile users is a challenge. Each company’s needs are different. While each company is working to balance their requirements among mobile, fixed, and cloud, IT expense management tools provide a greater control, allowing areas of inefficiency to be identified. Outdated tools pose a risk of poor time usage due to the sheer amount of data they must be able to process. Older systems are simply not equipped to handle multifaceted networking solutions.

Without a technology expense management program, it becomes difficult to stay competitive and meet current business needs. Automated systems such as TEM services can perform the same functions but in a quicker and more accurate manner. Through the usage of TEM, significant savings on mobile, cloud, and fixed/telecom are realized, while unused services, devices, and plans can be eliminated.

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