The world marketplace is still in the process of trying to sort itself out after all the social, political, and economic upheaval of the past few years. And one significant issue that enterprises are still wrestling with is the labor shortage.
There are multitudes of variables that are play into this dynamic; to attempt covering them all is far beyond the scope of this article. It’s fair to say that it’s tough to get competent employees at affordable rates right now. And it’s also fair to say that this challenge for management is not going away anytime soon.The good news is that if you are, say, Director of Telecommunications at XYZ Corporation and you have been tasked with leveling-up your company’s TEM program going forward, there is a solid option that can help you mitigate this big labor challenge.
The answer you are looking for may be in hiring a TEM partner (a good one of course; be careful choosing). A competent TEM partner will simply be in the best position to help your TEM program mitigate worker shortage issues and corresponding labor expenses.
The right TEM partner can help address worker shortage challenges within three separate departments:
1. Accounts Payable | Finance
2. Telecommunications | Operations Management
3. Information Technology | Network Management
Let’s look at some of the ways that an experienced TEM partner can assist your internal team by augmenting their value with strengths of their own.
They will add strength, flexibility, and affordability to your overall TEM program.
3 Ways a TEM Provider Helps Enterprise Teams
1. Support the Accounts Payable Group
A big part of any TEM program involves processing vendor invoices. Most of these invoices come from telecommunications carriers and are the invoices that enterprise AP teams must process and pay on behalf of the company.
This is a very mundane and tedious process that can rack up significant man hours and corresponding labor costs. Moreover, this job needs to be performed well or there will be significant penalties in the form of late fees for invoices not paid on time.
Additionally, there can be undesired service disconnects for non-payment issues as well, further driving up company overhead via early termination fees and/or re-connection charges depending upon the situation.
Internal Team Problem
Your day-to-day employees tend to become overwhelmed. This can happen for various reasons but it’s usually a combination of under-staffing and / or a complicated and large communications network.
Understaffing
This is usually driven by the desire to keep costs down and makes matters worse. Management will purposefully not backfill employees that either left on their own or were laid off.
This strategy is almost always a loser. It may save money in the short term (e.g., days, weeks) but this quickly translates into many operational failings that turn into late fees, unwanted disconnect fees etc.
Large | Complicated Network
The larger and more complicated that an enterprise communications network is, the more challenges and problems that will accompany the network. It’s that simple.
Internal expense management personnel that are not empowered with the right staff resources, subject matter expertise, and technology (i.e., TEM Platform) will struggle to pay all invoicing on time and execute in accordance with industry TEM best practices.
This is especially true for larger organizations with global reach. These companies will often have hundreds of locations across the country or globe, along with a multitude of carriers that are sending invoicing from every seeming direction.
Organizational and centralized management challenges such as this are very difficult for organizations to solve by themselves, without expert TEM support.
TEM Partner Solution
Partnering with strong TEM partner allows you to leverage all their deep domain expertise. A strong TEM lives and breathes every part of enterprise expense management every single day.
Their wings span across the entire breadth of the industry, and they specialize not only in telecommunications industry knowledge generally, but expense management best practices, and bring on very experienced analytical personnel with real subject matter expertise (SME).
Finally, this team will leverage the strength of its own TEM technology platform, which is designed to specifically expedite and facilitate sound data management best practices for the enterprise.
It’s all these factors together that allow a TEM partner to pivot very quickly when working to execute on all network operational imperatives and keep costs down.
And a TEM is best positioned to throttle up or down on a dime to address labor requirements and mitigate worker shorter challenges. Your TEM partner will be able to assign the proper resources to tasks and they will be able to do so quickly.
TEM Takeaway
A strong TEM will be able to automate 95% or more of your invoice processing and free your internal team to focus on higher-value activities. (At Tellennium, we employ RPA technology extensively, which certainly helps by avoiding employee challenges such as sick time, vacation time, abruptly quitting etc.)
2. Support the Telecommunications Group
Much like support for the AP team, the telecommunications analytical team that is tasked with audit and optimization work, amongst other tasks, has its hands full.
TEM Partner Solution
There is too much for your internal group to know and be expected to manage properly on an ongoing basis. Your internal group will also benefit enormously from a partnership with a TEM because they not only need the headcount support but, more importantly, need the deep subject-matter-expertise that will help drive material savings to your enterprise.
A strong TEM will have real carrier/service/network/industry expertise that your internal team will not possess.
TEM Takeaway
Enjoying the support of a competent TEM partner can mean the difference between hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings vs. millions of dollars in savings, especially over multiple years of a partnership (e.g., 3 to 6 years and beyond).
To get an estimate of savings that a TEM provider might be able to generate for your company, you might find our ROI Calculator useful.
3. Support the Information Technology Group
This team is generally interested and focused on keeping an organization running smoothy and efficiently. They have the challenge of keeping up with technology and keeping a business running in the face of natural disasters or other disruptions that could slow or stop business.
Business Continuity is a big deal for these folks. Partnering with a TEM gives this team added knowledge and expertise to ensure that all technology, systems, and processes are supported properly and backed up to avoid any disruptions to the business.
In our current era of marketplace instability and worker shortages, this is a real value-add for the team.
TEM Partner Solution
All competent TEM providers realizes how critical that this is. They understand that data and technology must be safeguarded with redundancies firmly in place. Partnering with a TEM will all but ensure that your company is safe in this regard.
TEM Takeaway
A competent TEM partner will have extensive contract language detailing plans and contingencies for natural disasters and other threats to business continuity.
When reviewing potential TEM partners, pay special attention to this area of concern. It’s real important, so make sure you are aligned with them before proceeding and ultimately signing the final agreement.
Conclusion
Partnering with a TEM is a great way to mitigate worker shortage challenges in our current marketplace. The key point is that they bring the right combination of talent, technology, and industry knowledge to add real value to your team.
Moreover, they are designed in such a way to have the flexibility and ability to throttle up or down almost instantaneously to properly assess your enterprise’s labor needs, which are almost certainly in a great deal of flux these days.
If you’d like to consider Tellennium in your TEM vendor comparisons, contact us to schedule a brief demo of our solution.
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