Have you ever had a gut feeling about something? Chances are, you most probably have. Now, have you made important decisions based on that gut feeling? If so, that decision may not have been optimal.
It makes sense that such decisions don’t always yield the best results. You need facts and hard numbers in order to make a rational, objective decision. Would you buy a house without knowing exactly how much money it would cost you per month? It’s the same for business: you need to know the value of your investment before you actually jump in to invest or make changes to that investment.
Enter Return on Investment
There’s a reason why upper management requires regular reports and analytics. They have to know why the company is doing what it’s doing and what the company is getting back from its current operations.
An easily-understood way to evaluate this information is by calculating the return on investment (ROI) any asset is generating for the company. Not only will knowing your ROI give management a proper rationale for having made the investment in the first place, it will give the necessary information to make better long-term decisions.
Now, calculating ROI can be very easy, or it can be very hard. For example, calculating the ROI of an asset directly linked to a profit-generating activity is easy. But for any asset that’s only indirectly linked to a profit-generating activity such as IT and telecom investments (including services that manage the technology), which are most often used internally, it can be very hard to calculate your ROI.
Because of this, many IT managers are having challenges in convincing upper management to invest in IT and telecom management solutions.
Yes! There is a way.
If you cannot calculate the direct profit generated by an asset, why not calculate the savings it is bringing to the company? Increased savings lead to an increased bottom line, after all. To find these savings, you need to know what you have, how much it cost, who has it, and how it’s being used.
Good telecom expense management (TEM) solutions do just that. In fact, good TEM solutions help companies save from 5% to 30% in IT and telecom costs. The best TEM solutions allow you to keep track of all your IT and telecom assets and services in one centralized database. With this information, you can find unused devices, reallocate service plans, and much more. All of this will allow you to find extra costs and cut them, leading to savings in IT spend.
Now, you likely know this, but how do you convince your bosses of these savings? Wouldn’t it be great if you can just calculate the ROI on your TEM solution just by clicking on a tab and looking at the results on an ROI dashboard?
Here’s a bit of great news: CimplManager does precisely that. Not only is CimplManager a TEM solution which allows you to manage your IT and telecom expenses and save huge amounts of time and money, it literally shows you your ROI from doing TEM in one convenient at-a-glance dashboard. This is CimplManager’s ROI Center, and it is a unique feature offered to our customers.
Among its benefits, this dashboard will show you your total dollar savings, both realized and identified (or potential), your time savings, and your inventory accuracy. Why do these matter? Well…
Savings in hard dollars immediately benefit your bottom line
The ROI Center shows you just how much money CimplManager saves (or potentially saves you) by:
- Finding billing discrepancies;
- Optimizing plans (for long-distance, roaming, text messages, and data usage); and
- Discovering zero usage, and more.
All of these elements cause big wasteful drains on your budget if you don’t address them the moment they come up. That’s why the act of finding them becomes a factor in the ROI of your TEM.
Time savings from automating your business processes translate into salary savings
By automating tasks, CimplManager saves your IT staff a lot of time. The ROI Center shows you the full number of hours you save from automating:
- The creation, processing, and approval of workorders;
- Sending email notifications and calls-to-action; and
- Inventory updates, and more.
Why is this pertinent? Well, those are all work hours that are paid. By automating tasks, your employees can devote their thinking and creativity to more strategically important tasks.
Inventory accuracy means you don’t have to spend money on the same thing twice
Tracking IT and telecom inventories is really, really involved. But it has to be done because if you don’t, you end up having to rebuy the same device and/or service over and over again because you think you don’t have it. The ROI Center shows you a snapshot of:
- Assignment of IT and telecom assets and services;
- Assets not entered or tracked in your inventory; and
- Services with no service contract, and more.
Get rid of ambiguity
So, why is the ROI Center the only one of its kind? It’s because we at Etelesolv embrace transparency. For us, there’s no room to hide behind ambiguity – we don’t accept rough estimates as a reasonable cover.
We put the ROI upfront and we stand by it. We also make the ROI results clear and easy to understand. That way, everyone can make good objective decisions about their IT investments going forward. And honestly, you really should not settle for a solution that doesn’t put this convenience in the palm of your hands.
For more information on this, watch our short video to see how easy it can be to identify your ROI from proper IT & telecom expense management.
Related Articles:
- How to Get ROI from TEM Solutions
- Why Your Business Needs Information Technology
- 3 Big Questions About IT & Telecom Management
