UK Firms Wasting Over £1Billion Through Poor Telecom Expense Management"

(PRWEB) May 1, 2009

In 2008 Xceed launched Xceed Telecom Expense Management (XTEM) which is a new, Software as a Service (SaaS), way of analysing and managing telecom costs for; fixed line, mobile and data networks. It's proving conclusively that there are substantial savings to be made by all companies without changing suppliers or incurring risks. With an average saving of 40% from more than twenty completed XTEM projects and UK telecom bills exceeding £3 Billion per annum it's reasonable to suggest that a massive £1B could be saved by UK companies.

With over 20 projects completed Xceed has uncovered some startling statistics:

•     80% of telecom bills contain miss-billing or hidden charges
•     Just 67% of telecoms spend is managed
•     15%-35% of telecoms fixed assets are not used
•     63% of firms do not have an accurate inventory of their telecoms estate

Through poor invoice & inventory management, UK companies are spending over £1B more than necessary on their telecoms. The average UK company spends 3.6% of their entire P&L on telecoms. XTEM has averaged 40% savings on over 20 completed projects with companies of varied size and from several industries. This suggests that you could be shaving a full 1% off your entire P&L spend, without risk, by improving your telecoms expense management.

If consumers were regularly charged 20%-40% more than they should be, for home phones or mobiles it's fair to assume most would notice and do something about it, quickly. John Casserly of Xceed has discovered that the majority of their clients, typically large corporations within the financial services sector, still rely on "stare & compare" as a way of scrutinising their telecom bills. With this approach if the bill is within 10% variance of the previous month it will be paid, without further scrutiny; even in companies where the annual spend exceeds £500m. A surprising finding given the parlous state of many financial firms' balance sheets, but it's not limited to the private sector.

According to Gary Stewart, Director and Product Manager for XTEM at Xceed, "100% of public sector organisations we've worked with can't tell us how much they spend on their telecoms when we start a project."

Telecoms Expense Management (TEM) is a multi-billion dollar industry in the US and tellingly the most forward thinking organisations, relating to TEM, in the UK are US based companies which have rolled out a global TEM solution; Bank of America and American Express being the most high profile examples. In the UK there is generally a poor understanding of this space and businesses are missing out on no-risk, easy to achieve savings every day. One recent example, of an Xceed client realising the missed opportunity, was where it took over 4 months from the initial agreement to proceed to actually implementing the savings identified. The client came to appreciate that this delay alone had effectively cost them over £300,000.

The message is clear; in such a challenging economic climate when the majority of companies are looking to take costs out of the business through IT rationalisation, headcount reduction and cancelling non-core projects TEM is still a large area of spend ripe for attention which doesn't impact the business performance or staff morale. For an introduction to Telecoms Expense Management download the white paper at http://www.xcsl.co.uk/white-paper.htm

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