TEM Provides Better Budget Forecasting; One Version of the Truth

Using a TEM platform gives an enterprise a single, normalized view of their organization’s IT and telecom estate. This enables more accurate and informed forecasting of their annual budgets and identifies redundant services which can be cut.
In many organizations one of the best kept secrets is hidden or ignored with budgets that attempt to piece together expenses that are reported in different formats by account payable and other departments. TEM enables rationalization and harmonization of various views providing clarity with the ability to zoom in and zoom out with different views from a budget perspective.
Although an enterprise’s budget might be well maintained at a high level, it can be difficult to explain exactly what makes up the costs from individual budget lines for respective providers. This lack of visibility gets exacerbated when a company goes through a large- scale migration project, or is part of a merger or acquisition activity. In such instances, being able to track the reduction in one budget line against the increase of another is imperative for good management control. It’s no longer acceptable for management to have a mindset that “the costs are pretty static, they’re about the same each month.” One of Europe’s largest retailers benefited from a review comparing various elements. This gave Management a clear picture of their ongoing spend, historic and redundant services. Working closely with the retailer and one of ETMA’s members, they were able to manage and adjust the budget accordingly.
Providing this kind of flexibility to an organization helps them in a number of ways. First, it means that managing the budget going forward becomes far easier. Second, it makes it possible to align the invoice payment process more closely with the existing budget. Finally, it makes tracking and paying invoices far simpler.
Giving greater visibility to the underlying spend in the budget provided detailed product level information that allowed them to drastically reduce their budget and manage special projects like a complex WAN migration. Significant cost that would have been otherwise ignored without TEM was given this greater level of transparency. It highlighted unused wasteful expenses on services which had been left for years from previous projects which were still actively billing. Due to the incumbent invoice approval process these unused services had never been identified.
Using TEM not only provides an enterprise with a clearer, more accurate budgeting process, but it also enables a deeper understanding of their entire IT and telecom estate, meaning costs can be tracked as well as reduced against the current budget, while forecasting for the following year.