why mobility management?

What is Mobility Management?

This is a good question as this term and other idioms used in the wireless telecom industry are often used interchangeably to define many different aspects of corporate wireless and device management.
In a broad definition this term refers to all aspects of wireless telecom management, which can be broken down into the following categories:

• Telecom Expense Management (TEM) and more specifically Wireless Expense Management (WEM) refer to the idea of organizations managing and controlling their mobile costs & usages. Mobile costs are becoming one of the fastest growing corporate expenses which have lead to the creation of the TEM/WEM provider industry.
• Asset Management refers to management of your mobility inventory, from hardware devices such as phones, smart-phones, tablets, data modem (sticks) to carrier subscriber lines, contracts and plans.
• Procurement & Order Management is the capability to create orders or requests for new wireless hardware and service changes (including features such as roaming packages) while allowing for an approval, tracking and notification process.

Why does my organization need Mobility Management?

• Cost Savings
  The primary reason corporations and organizations choose to use a Mobility Management system is to save on their wireless costs.
  Without truly and deeply understanding your organizations wireless expenses and usages as well as having full control and visibility into your wireless assets and procurement process you and your organization will never be able to fully reduce and control all your mobile costs. Having a Wireless Management solution with a good expense management feature can generate savings up to 40% according to analyst firms such as Gartner and Forrester among others. A good Mobility Management solution will allow organizations to easily compile facts (both current and historical) about your company’s contracts, plans, usage statistics and cost analysis. Having a full grasp of your organization’s mobile usages and their associated costs will allow you and your organization to make better decisions with respects to your selection of wireless plans, features, hardware devices, etc, pooling strategies and indeed into your choice of wireless carrier(s) and the ensuing contract negotiations or re-negotiations. Without the proper information in your pocket you and your organization will not achieve the best contract results with your mobile carrier(s) or potential mobile carrier(s) and will therefore lose possible savings.Other areas where costs can easily accrue are in unused lines, idle roaming/travel plans, unused devices, overages and more. A good Mobility Management system with good embedded Business Intelligence software would easily be able to highlight these hidden expenses (which can account for as much as 40% or your carrier expenses) and allow your organization or management service to address them, leading to further cost savings.

• Visibility – Understanding your organization’s mobility needs
  A Mobility Management solution will give you good visibility into how your organization is using its mobile services and devices. As mentioned earlier a good solution would have good Business Intelligence element with the capabilities to slice-&-dice your data and present in many ways that would otherwise be difficult if not impossible to compile. This would allow you to have more insight or visibility into your wireless data, giving you the following benefits:
  • Segment your data into areas that you need to focus on, such as roaming fees, data overages, long distance charges and many other factors.
  • Define and track key indicators such as average cost per user, true cost voice usage, cost per corporate departments or cost centers, premium calls & texts made, weekend & evening usage & costs, and much, much more.
  • View historical data or trends such as voice/data/text usage or cost over a time period (month-to-month, quarter-to-quarter or year-to-year comparisons). Overlaying multiple trends such as usage over cost over time can provide even further insight into your corporation’s carrier expense growth or savings over a time period among other key performance indicators.
  • Improve employee productivity by better understanding how employees are utilizing your organization’s wireless technology (personal use vise-a-vie corporate use) and to ensure employee safety. This information as well as other information generated by a Mobility Management solution leads us to our next point.
  • Be better positioned to create a telecom policy for your organization and good on-going enforcement of those policies.

• Process Management/Procurement
  Another important feature of Mobility Management is to have one avenue for all your organization’s wireless procurement needs. This includes everything from purchasing new hardware devices (including upgrades) and new phone lines to adding & removing features and changing plans (including roaming plans) to resetting voicemail and reporting lost devices as well as everything in between.
  Utilizing such a system allows you to track the progress of your open procurements, ensure proper approval & enforcement of your telecom policy rules as well as track & manage the costs of all procurements.

• Save Time
  Having all your telecom data in one place along with a procurement process will save your organization both time and energy. Without a Mobility Management solution in place you would have to spend much time, energy and resources to come up with your own solution whether that is a manual one or a form of automation. Utilizing a Mobility Management solution, particularly one that offers its solution as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) package will save you even more money as your organization will not need to allocate resources to implement this solution within your organization.
  Further time and energy can be saved by utilizing a Mobility Management solution’s Managed Services (note: not all vendors offer this service). This service would include such things as setting-up your solution (data), managing & maintaining your monthly carrier invoices (uploading), analysis of your data with cost saving suggestions (optimization) to insuring all your procurements are fulfilled on time and accurately.

We at BlueCloud Mobility believe that we meet and surpass all the aforementioned requirements for a first-class Mobility Management solution.
Please read more about our offering or feel free to call or email us for more information as well as an online demo of our products.