It’s obviously important for a business to understand its costs and expenses, because such an understanding is vital for managers and executives to make proper decisions about how and where money is spent -- and those decisions go directly to the bottom line. A common way to approach this is for every expense to be assigned to its appropriate cost center within the business, thereby providing the insights into where and how a particular business unit is spending money that allow for proper financial decision-making.
On the flip side of that coin, though, a potentially damaging weakness is revealed: If costs are not billed to their true appropriate cost centers, managers and executives will be making decisions based on information that’s incorrect -- meaning their decisions may also sometimes be incorrect.
One area in which we sometimes see this taking place is how our customers bill back their mobile expenses to their various cost centers. The problems arise because most businesses with mobility implementations make use of mobile pooling in which bundles of plans are purchased simultaneously to account for all of their mobile device users. Thus, a company with 100 mobile devices, for example, would purchase a hundred 10GB plans for them and distribute the devices to users across various cost centers, and come billing time each cost center is charged for the number of 10GB plans they have.
So far, so good -- at least on the surface. But errancies arise from this practice, because not all mobile device users are actually consuming the same amount of data through their phones. John, for example, might actually use 100GB of data during a billing cycle, while many other users use far less than even their 10GB allotments. In terms of data usage, this is not a problem: Connection pooling allows for it by simply taking unused data allotments from other users and making it available to John.
But there is a problem here, and it’s the one with which we started this discussion: When the mobile bills come in, the costs are distributed to the various cost centers based on the devices, and not on how they were actually used. Thus, John’s cost center is assigned the costs of his 10GB plan, even though in reality he may have been actually using the data allotment assigned to various other cost centers. And as pointed out, the end result is one in which cost-control and other fiscal decision-making can be compromised, because cost centers other than John’s have been effectively subsidizing his data usage.
The example provided above is fairly trivial, in the sense that for illustration purposes it’s fairly small in scale. But in larger organizations, this scenario can play out over many cost centers with a high number of users both over- and under-consuming their data allotments at a scale that makes it easier to understand the importance for executives of properly having a true understanding of their mobility costs.
The Wireless Watchdog platform allows us to attack this problem on two different fronts. First, we’re always buying mobile accounts for our customers within their connection pools as optimally as possible, which addresses both costs and allocations head-on. But secondly, our platform also features reallocation reports that the system generates for our customers in order to let them know to which cost centers their mobile charges should actually be billed back.
It’s a system that saves our customers money -- typically more than $10 per month, per device -- but also empowers executives decision-making that’s based on actual data, rather than incorrect cost assignments.
We’d love to show you the platform in action, along with the ways in which it empowers your company to start getting the true ROI that your mobility implementations should be generating. Just click the Request a Demo button, and we’ll help you get started.