…to Free Up Tens of Thousands for Next Year’s Budget
Twas the night before budget submittal
and all through the office,
not a creature was stirring
Except that guy named Wallace (in Finance)…
As you crunch the budget numbers for the upcoming year, make sure to examine your corporate mobility program. Sounds simple, and it really can be. Even if you think all possible savings have been squeezed out of your plan, it’s likely that you could free up a jaw-dropping sum of money for other key initiatives, perhaps even enough to fund additional headcount in 2016.
Nearly always, when we audit a company’s mobile plan – whether it’s corporate-owned business only (COBO), company-issued and personally enabled (COPE) or choose your own device (CYOD) – vast savings are uncovered.
In many cases, we see mobility as “homeless” within the organization. Frequently, no department truly owns mobility wholly. One department may manage invoices and payments while another handles device approval and purchases, and another is responsible for setup and maintenance. The upkeep of the various plans themselves, or the optimization and cost containment of them, often gets lost in this mix.
Moreover, in today’s competitive business environment, few enterprises are able to allocate staff hours to nurture and track their ever-changing mobility plan options and this duty becomes a “jump ball” within the organization. Employees understandably are focused on other revenue-generating or mission critical functions with little time to manually audit a mobility plan, especially when it seems to be working “well.”
Indeed, one of our enterprise clients recently finished an optimization effort and reduced mobile spend from $97,000 to $84,000 monthly before we had a chance to conduct our own audit and analysis. The client’s team was convinced that additional savings would not be found. However, after quickly analyzing the company’s mobile data files and sharing our findings during a 30-minute preso, we uncovered an additional 30 percent in savings without having to change provider, devices or features. How’s that for budget saving?
Mobile carriers create and modify plans constantly, and many older or “grandfathered” ones have been sidelined. As a result, new activations are enrolled in only currently available packages even when older plans are a better fit.
Other culprits like a shift in employee usage patterns such as $0-billing or swings to new international roamers can be costly and go undetected for months if not years.
The lesson here is to continually examine and optimize your mobility plan – or, as the Enterprise Mobile Chairman and CEO of CIO magazine recommends, have an external expert do it for you – because odds are good that significant savings will be realized without changing carriers or devices.
Happy budget season to all, and to all a good night…