CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
How Cell-Phone Management Drives Continuous Cost Savings
A PRIME CANDIDATE FOR COST REDUCTION in just about any industry is your cellular wireless spend for both voice and data services. For many organizations wireless can be confusing because it tends not to be a centralized spend category, which can offer significant challenges for tracking the various carriers, plans, phones, and so on in order to make an effort toward optimization. However, once you learn to navigate the airwaves, wireless can become an area where significant savings may be achieved with relative ease.
FINDING THE DECISION MAKER
The first and most critical step in your wireless sourcing initiative is to find the correct decision maker. This is the first step of every project but, with wireless, you will be amazed at just how important this step is to a successful saving initiative, because many different department budgets may be involved. There may be a sales department that handles the sales team’s accounts, an information technology (IT) department that manages BlackBerrys, a fleet department that governs push-to-talk phones, and an executive secretary who is in charge of C-level executive phones. See how convoluted this has already become? When laid out in this logical and aggregate manner, it sounds ridiculous to have so many levels of influence for something like wireless, but many companies that have built up their wireless services in an ad hoc fashion over the years work with this ...
