It has been a while since the King of Telecom has written a post. So as it is a new year I am setting a goal of writing at least one new post (article) per month. For many companies the new year means planning their own goals and reviewing the services they have in place. Your goal as it relates to telecommunications should be to try and improve your overall environment in this new year.
One easy way for companies to audit their network services is to gather their current bills and do a simple inventory of what they have in place. For instance, a company might have one vendor for voice, one for data, and lastly a maintenance contract for their phone equipment. It is a good idea to collect these bills at the end or beginning of each year and perform a simple audit.
First, get an idea of all the services you have in place and create an inventory of your network assets. It's not a bad idea to create a network map if you don't already have one. Include on your inventory a breakdown of monthly fixed costs as well as the variable usage costs for the services with associated rates. Also, list any taxes or fees associated with your services. A simple example might look like this:
3MB Dynamic T1 Circuit - $750.00/month
23B + D channels (PRI) - included
Unlimited local calling - included
3MB of dynamic bandwidth - included
100 DIDs - $10.00
1 Toll Free Number - $5.00
Router - included
10,000 minutes of LD per month with $0.025 overage - $250.00/month
Conference Calling - $0.22/minute - current billing $22.00
Cable Modem (for back-up internet) - $90.00
PBX Maintenance (broken down by monthly cost) - $200.00
Taxes: $80.00/month
Total Monthly Costs: $1,407.00
In this example you can see that the company is paying a little over $1400/month for their voice and data services. Maybe the company is looking to increase bandwidth but wants to reduce overall costs by %20. We can clearly see that one way to do this is to take advantage of the cable modem for more bandwidth by making it a primary source of Internet and maybe reducing our T1s to 1.5 MB (essentially a single T1) from 3.0 MB (essentially two T1s). This way the T1 would only be used for voice and the cable modem would be used for primary Internet. Also if the T1 was dynamic it could be used for back-up Internet as we would only need a minimum source of Internet bandwidth for back-up or redundant purposes. This would probably reduce our current costs by $300 or 21%.
Clearly, by taking a simple inventory of what we had in place and by reviewing our current costs we can easily determine where to focus cost containment activities or where we might need to improve services. Keep in mind that taking a simple audit of your network assets also allows you to identify wasteful spending and to consolidate vendors where possible. With this information we could also have other companies or consultants quickly review our environment and quote alternate solutions that could offer benefits.
Lastly, it can be a good idea to review this information with your current vendors and see if they can offer any ideas or solutions on how to improve your current cost structure or services.
I wish everyone a happy and successful new year. Use these exercises to help improve your bottom-line.
Regards,
Harris Von Essen
"King of Telecom"
