Streamline Your Billing Process and Reduce Your Spend With Technology Expense Optimization

Author: Corinne Kerner
Vice President, Technology Optimization Group at BCM One

For the last couple of decades, technology expense management (TEM) has been the way many organizations handle their billing. Paper billing has long gone the way of the dinosaur, thanks to the large expense involved in printing, shipping, storing and processing. When TEM first came on the scene, it saved organizations around the world tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses annually.

However, technology expense management comes with one giant drawback: It doesn’t actually solve many of your telecom problems. Some TEM software systems only make you aware of them. So now, you only really have the advantage of knowing about ten different fires you need to put out. You still have to expend a lot of man hours on putting out those same fires, without much help from TEM software other than where they’re located.

Enter BCM One’s technology expense optimization (TEO). This is a technology that goes one step further than TEM. Rather than a passive list of problems you need to deal with, technology expense optimization goes that extra step and actually starts fixing problems relating to your billing and invoicing. That doesn’t just save you man hours. It also allows you to get more out of your payroll dollars by focusing your staff on more productive and engaging tasks.

The main solution provided by TEO is centralization of all your data in one place. This allows your data to tell you a story. The story is then actionable at a higher level than just spot checking billing and invoices. TEO gives you a complete picture of where your budget is being spent and whether you’re getting the kind of return on that investment that you’re looking for. Changes to your budget and allocations can be implemented in a far more streamlined manner with TEO than with TEM.

Larger organizations will see an immediate and massive benefit when data from several information nodes is brought together in one place. Smaller organizations will see many of the problems related to scaling eliminated with centralized data. It’s a win for organizations of any size, no matter what their current challenges and goals are.

BCM One’s solution, Sophia, validates invoices before you even look at them. It enables financial allocation of costs to appropriate departments based on actual need. Best of all, it can do this automatically so you don’t have to spend hours on drudge work every month. When contracts are about to expire, you’ll get as many warnings as you like to avoid services inadvertently and automatically renewing in an off-market or unnecessary contract and to sidestep rate increases at the end of a contract. It can even make contract assignment a much easier task during corporate growth or contraction activity. Acquisition no longer has to be a headache of inherited paperwork.

Best of all, you can pair Sophia with our top of the line managed services that provide technology expense optimization. We’re the pioneers in the field of TEO, but we also have decades of built up relationships in the industry. That means we’re able to get your company the best deal on just about any technology services you’re currently using and many that you’re not using because you didn’t know you needed them or considered them too expensive.

That’s what makes BCM One different. Our highly skilled professionals with decades of experience are constantly in the trenches looking for the best possible deals for our customers. We’re familiar with common industry vendors. We know just how low they’ll go and what contract lines they’re willing to budge on.

Talk to a BCM One representative about how we can streamline your billing process, save you money on services and make your organization leaner and more agile.