As we begin to move towards a post-COVID business environment there are great opportunities right now for IT professionals to flex their muscles and not only save their organizations money, but get back on track with all the initiatives you put on the back burner last year. To do so, however, you must first find ways to tackle a few obstacles.
Here are 3 that we're hearing a lot about these days:
- Dealing with more work and a smaller staff, with many working from home and reluctant to return to business as usual.
- Vendor issues, including forcing shorter pay cycles and more aggressive collections activities.
- Billing and invoicing delays from vendors, due to their own staffing deficits and operational issues
How to tackle these issues?
A smaller staff gives you fewer hands-on-deck, which means you have to work smarter, waste less time and make some tough decisions as to which tasks you continue to tackle yourselves and which ones might be better served through outsourcing. One action you can take now that would save money without requiring additional resources is to conduct an audit of your IT/Telecom services, inventory and billing. Audits have a good track record of saving companies thousands of dollars off their monthly IT/telecom spend. That is money you could surely use to bring in new technologies and better serve your end users.
As for issues with vendors and billing, these are areas where IT managers have plenty of tools to help. They just need to know where to find them! For instance, TTI's TEM (Telecommunication Expense Management) provides some badly needed visibility over your inventory and billing to help you find all those billing inaccuracies. And, believe us, they exist!
And, instead of continuing to take a back seat to invoice management, you can use your TEM to support actions that help you get control over your vendors, making sure you are no longer being billed for inventory you are no longer using and that your invoices are accurate.
By the way, it will quickly become clear how TEM will pay for itself by saving hundreds of thousands of dollars on your annual telecom spend.
As we emerge from the hunker-down mentality to one of rolling up our sleeves and getting back to work on a new set of goals, think about which tools make sense for your IT department and how they can help you better serve your company.
And don't hesitate to contact us with your challenges. We have been providing TEM to businesses all over the world for over 30 years. So we know your world and are ready to help!