TEM for Healthcare: The Cure for IT Budgets
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TEM solutions can help healthcare organizations manage their large and growing telecom expenses more efficiently. Valicom provides flexible TEM options including invoice processing, cost allocation, and optimization tools to help clients gain visibility and control over telecom costs. For one healthcare system client, Valicom helped standardize processes across locations, provide invoice processing and bill pay services, and increase cost transparency between departments, resulting in improved telecom expense management.
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TEM for Healthcare: The Cure for IT Budgets
- 1. TEM for Healthcare: The Cure for IT Budgets Telecom costs are estimated to reach $100B by 2017. What’s your plan?
- 2. Brought to you by:
- 3. Why Valicom? Flexible – Wide range of TEM Solutions from DIY to BPO + Web-Based Software Experienced – Over 24 years in business Independent – We work only for you Ethical – Proud member of TEMIA Diverse – Certified 100% woman owned business
- 4. Background
- 5. “Telecom costs are among the largest operating expenses for organizations. Yet, they’re often the most inconsistently managed.”
- 8. The Symptoms
- 10. Lacking the Time / Resources
- 11. “Compared to simply renegotiating with incumbent providers, going to RFP saves enterprises 20-25%.”
- 12. To the untrained eye… Lacking the Expertise
- 13. The Cure
- 15. Goodbye Excel!
- 16. No software or manual updates, ever. Concurrent – big telecom team? No problem. Web-Based Tools
- 17. Cost Allocation Slicing it up • Up to 1% of the total invoice • Create transparency between departments • No longer ‘Who’s going to pay for this?’
- 18. Invoice Processing Mid-large sized healthcare orgs receive 400 telecom invoices monthly… …and 70% of IT manger don’t have accurate inventories of their requirement or plans.
- 20. Distilling Meaning Advanced and Custom Reporting - What stands out? - Managing by exception
- 22. Bill Pay Time for Bill Pay? • Service Disruptions • Frequent Phone Payments • Misapplied Payments Benefits of Bill Pay • Reduced Load • Consolidate Payments • Reduced Late Fees • No More Waiting on Hold
- 23. Finding the Right Fit
- 25. Valicom’s Values Memorable Experiences Authenticity Inspiration Passion Innovation Enduring Connections
- 26. Flexible Services A la Carte Service Menu: • Clearview TEM Software • Invoice Auditing & Processing • Bill Pay • Inventory Management • Optimization • RFP & Contract Negotiation • Device Procurement
- 27. Client Satisfaction • Professionalism • Overall expectation • Communication • Quality and Accuracy • Understanding client needs • Responsiveness • Meeting deadlines • Overall value
- 28. CASE STUDY: Healthcare System Background: • $2.2 M annual telecom spend • 42 Locations Challenges: - Continuity between locations - Invoice Processing - Transparency between departments Solution: - Policies & Procedures - Cost Allocation - Valicom Invoice Processing Bill Pay
- 29. Questions?
- 30. Contact Ellie Sherven esherven@valicomcorp.com 608-227-0619 Website: www.valicomcorp.com Blog: blog.valicomcorp.com
Editor's Notes
- Alright, we are going to get started. Hopefully we’ve given everyone enough time to login and get settled for our presentation today. Welcome everyone to our webinar today. The topic today is TEM for healthcare, and finding the cure for IT budgets through telecom expense management services and tools. Forrester Research predicted recently that healthcare telecom costs will reach $100 billions dollars by 2017. That number has a lot of telecom and IT people worried. The big question lingering here is, what our is your plan, how will you navigate these costs going forward? Today I’m going to share some critical decision points that it is time to start thinking more strategically about your telecom costs, and what adjustments you can make now to set yourself up for success for the coming year. Our session will run about 45 minutes, and I’m confident it will be the most valuable part of your day. Let’s get started.
- Today’s webinar brought to you by Valicom – a telecom expense management firm founded and based in Madison, WI.
- And just a little bit about why our clients choose the Valicom team for their TEM needs. We are flexible – our telecom expense management solutions include both services and software. All of our managed services are offered a la carte. Which means you can pick and choose only the things you need to supplement your team. We are experienced – Valicom has been serving clients with TEM services for over 24 years. We are independent – we are not tied to any one carrier. Which means that we don’t receive kick backs from pointing our clients to a particular carrier, we only recommend services based on what is right for your environment. We are Ethical – Valicom is a proud and active members of TEMIA – the telecom expense management industry association And finally – we are diverse, Valicom is a 100% woman-owned business, so if you are looking to fulfill your diversity quota this year, please keep us in mind.
- The first chapter of our webinar today is a little bit of background and exploring the need for TEM – what does it mean, who is actively using it, and what options exist – and the potential impact it will have within healthcare organizations.
- A few eye opening facts to get the juices flowing as we being. Dimension Data reported this year that telecom costs are among the largest operating expenses for organizations, and yet – they’re often the most inconsistently managed expenses. Is this you or one of your prospective client’s story? Do they have the processes and procedures in place for when a telecom invoice arrives in the mail? It’s not uncommon that telecom invoices are going unchecked, and just paid without a second thought or even a review of the current charges. I have one story that send shivers down my spine. A client came to us with a huge over expenditure within their telecom environment. Their invoice processes looked something like this: A telecom invoice would come in the mail. The amount due was checked against last month’s invoice – and if it was within 20% of amount due from last months – it was paid, without question. Think of the compound affect of this practice. Ouch.
- Let’s talk specifically about industries who are prioritizing TEM in 2015. The AOTMP – authority on telecom management practices reported last year that healthcare organization are prioritizing TEM practices at a rate of 89%, compared to 75% of across all industries. We’re seeing broader adoption in the healthcare than any other industry, and for so many good reasons. We’ll cover the benefits of TEM in healthcare as we progress through our webinar today.
- What are the burning needs of healthcare when it comes to TEM. The AOTMP furthered their study and determined that optimizing telecom service costs, and improving internal workflow were the top priorities for TEM in healthcare organizations. They also reported that on average, healthcare organization are saving on average 9% on their fixed lines and 11% of their mobile costs by implementing a TEM program. What could another 9-11% of your client’s telecom budget do for their overall bottom line? So this is some great industry specific information, now let’s chat more about what we see when a new client steps through our door. For this, I’m going to hand it over to Pete, and he will talk us through some of the symptoms we see often.
- When it comes to symptoms – there are so many signs that it’s time to consider TEM. Here’s just a few that we see more often than not are the tipping point for organizations to adopt TEM practices and managed services.
- The first and most important signs that you need some telecom expense management in your life is if you have no idea what you are spending month over month, year over year. Some of you might be shaking your heads – how can an organization not know what they are spending? When you throw in multiple hospital, clinics, and doctors offices locations – spread across many cities or even states. And then you throw different carriers into the mix. This mix of many locations, many departments, spread across many locations - quickly creates a really large and complex telecom environment. It’s easy to understand how you can be unsure of what you are actually spending. This is the number one sign that it’s time for proactive telecom management. In our experience, and across many industries, if you ask an IT or telecom team to estimate their telecom costs – only about 85% will have some idea of what is being spent. And those that do take a guess, their guess is usually about 25-40% off of their actual costs.
- Often a healthcare technology team is lacking the time or the resources to properly manage a telecom environment or process the subsequent invoices correctly. How big is your telecom or technology team? What other duties are they responsible for – and does this leave them with time to be reviewing these invoices, line by line? And who is going to be calling the carriers to be credited for incorrect billing rates and other billing errors? If you can believe it, being bill for your rates agreed up in your contract are the billing errors that we see most commonly – and it is one of those things that can be easily overlooked if you are in a hurry to approve invoices, or don’t have the time to be searching for these errors. What’s worse is when reviewing an invoice gets put on the back burner for so long, that it never gets done – and then there are late chargers, or a line gets disconnected because of it. A TEM firm can come in and take care of many duties related to telecom environment – from invoice processing, bill pay, cost allocation and even contract negotiation. Which leaves your team with the time and energy to be doing what they do best.
- Here’s an example. Gartner released this little factoid recently. If your contract terms are coming due, it might be worth the time and effort to renegotiate your terms. It never hurts to ask right? Let’s take it even one step further. Gartner’s research says that compared to simply renegotiating, doing an RFP will save a business 20-25% of their costs. This is a great scenario and example of why so many are turning to TEM firms. Do you have the time or resources to create and manage an RFP? The answer is probably not.. But could you benefit with that 20-25% back in your technology budget? Absolutely. A TEM firm can help you renegotiate or even go to RFP for new completely services. The secret is, that sometimes even just the threat of an RFP will send carriers cowering to the corner.
- Finally on our list of signs that it’s time for TEM. We talked about not having the time or resources… next is not having the proper telecom experience or expertise. Reviewing telecom invoices for errors and incorrect rates can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. Often invoices are arriving to an organization in many different formats – some as EDI information, some are pulled from the carrier’s portals, and others are arriving in the mail – as 1,000 page documents. The sheer amount of information available and to be processed can be overwhelming. Then let’s add looking for errors and inconsistencies into the mix. Invoice preview is a hugely daunting task, and if you don’t know what you’re looking for – chances are that you aren’t going to find it. If you are lacking the expertise to discover and remedy these errors – it might be time to be seriously considering TEM services and tools.
- Those symptoms and pain points can see really overwhelming – but the good news is that there is a cure. In this section I’m going to talk specifically about tools and services that will bring greater transparency and efficiency within your telecom processes.
- The first and one of the most powerful ways to regain control of your telecom environment and costs is to find the right tools. Have you ever tried to scoop a bowl of ice cream with a regular tea-spoon? Sure it has some of the same properties of a real ice cream scoop – a handle with a small curved bowl at the end. But scooping a bowl of ice cream with a tea spoon is going to take way longer. The long and the short of it is that it’s just not the right tool to efficiently do the job. The same rules can apply to managing your telecom environment.
- So often we come across organizations and consultants using complex Excel sheets to manage their telecom environments. And just like the teaspoon is no good for scooping a bowl of ice cream, and Excel sheet is not giving you the functionality or efficiency that a dedicated TEM tool would give you. That’s where Clearview comes in. Clearview is Valicom’s TEM engine – it’s the tool we built for managing these costs. The goal when we built it was to bring transparency into your environment, for example - what devices are being billed, what has been disconnected, and what remains active. Our second goal with Clearview is to bring meaning and report ability into your spend – for example how is your spending changing in the last month, quarter, and year? What has changed, and how are we reacting to those changes?
- One of the biggest advantages to Clearview, is that it is a web based tool. Which means that we push all of the new features and updated to you automatically. There are never any software installations or updates necessary. Another advantage is that your entire team can access Clearview concurrently. With a Excel spreadsheet – you are stuck saving as, and trying to work from the most recent version – making it hard for more than one person to be working on the telecom processes at the same time. And finally – something that we don’t talk about enough is that Clearview allows you to assign role based permissions to as many people within your team as necessary. For example – your accounts payable team might have read-only access, and your telecom manager has full editing permissions.
- We’ve talked about tools for curing your TEM woes, now let’s transition into some key services that will make your life easier. When I initially started planning this webinar, I met with Pete to talk specifically about the services that our healthcare clients consider and problems they are dealings with. And the very first thing her brought up was cost allocation. We’ve heard some real horror stories about animosity between departments, teams fighting over who is going to pay for what services. Proper and transparent cost allocation will help ease these tensions between departments. What’s great about our cost allocation system – is that we can help you slice up your costs down to 1% of the total invoice amount. You can get really granular with your cost allocation. So no longer is it – ‘who’s going to pay for this?’ – these costs can be split up correctly and fairly between departments, locations, and employees.
- The next service that will ease some serious telecom pain is invoice processing. The mid to large size healthcare organizations are receiving upwards of 400 telecom invoices annually… and yet only 70% of IT manager have an accurate inventory. What this stat says to us is that … health care orgs are overwhelmed with invoices, but they aren’t doing very much with the information – they are just paying the bills without review or further scrutiny. So much so that their inventories have gone all out of whack, and they don’t even know what they are paying for anymore. Being able to wrap your arms around what is being billed to your organization will give you peace of mind that you are being billed only what is absolutely necessary and actually being used. It will allow you to build a precise inventory, turn off what is not being used, and most importantly forecast costs more acurately for the coming year.
- Just as a funny anecdote. I absolutely love this picture. This stack of paper represents one month of invoices from one of our clients. See the golf club there for scale. Can you image the time and resources it takes to review, process and pay of these invoices? It’s the main reason this client came to Valicom – to free up their internal resources and gain peace of mind that their environment is being managed accurately, and that all of these bills are being paid on time.
- Every month healthcare organization are receiving a barrage of information within their telecom invoices. What they do with that information is totally up to them. With Clearview, this information can be harnessed, visualized, and used to make educated decisions about the spend. The goal with advanced and customized Clearview reporting is extracting meaningful information from your telecom spend information. To take this barrage of information, and make it into something meaningful and useful. Spend by location, department, employee Variance tracking – managing by exception. What looks different this month from last month – what changed, and should we be alarmed. For many of our clients and partners, this is the aha! moment. The moment that they understand why reporting and Clearview are such powerful and necessary tool.
- Ok – so let’s get back to this big pile of invoices. You have this barrage of paper mail that arrives at your doorstep every month, pages after pages – line after line of invoices that need to be paid, correctly and on time. How are you managing the payment? And are you sure that each payment is applied to the correct amount?
- The final service that will have the biggest impact on healthcare organization is bill pay. Here are a few signs that it’s time for Bill Pay: - Service Disruptions – if you are experiencing frequent disconnections of lines due to incorrect payment amount of a lay payment - Frequently need to pay by phone – if you often have to pay over the phone to avoid suspension or lay payment - Misapplied Payments – your payments are being applied to the wrong charges, causing service disruptions and late fees Benefits of Bill Pay Reduce Load: Take the weight off your internal Accounts Payable team Consolidate Payments: We cut one check per invoice, reducing risk of misapplied or delayed payments. Reduced Late Fees: We pay the right amount for each invoice, at just the right time. No More Waiting on Hold: We have all of the right contacts for your carriers. Let us escalate issues and request refunds to carriers on your behalf.
- One of the last and most important pieces to this puzzle is finding a TEM firm that best fits your organization’s size and structure. There are a few factors that come into play when selecting a TEM vendor – we’ll cover the things that should be on your radar when reaching out and having initial discussions with TEM firms.
- Many of our clients come to us in a world of hurt. Their telecom environments are our of control and they just don’t have what it takes to get it back in check. In many ways – it’s like airing their dirty laundry. In many cases it’s the part of their business that they don’t want anyone to see, especially not an outsider, or even worse – one of their competitors. To make a TEM relationship work and be successful - there needs to be a deep seated trust between the client and the TEM firm. Finding someone you trust and can count on is absolutely critical. This TEM firm is here to shine light on your issues – offer constructive feedback – and help implement the fixes. Without a sense of trust – you will not be able to maximize the opportunity.
- We talk about the importance of trust with a TEM relationship – and building trust is a two way street. Which is why I want to give you a little peak into what drives our team every day. These are our values, it’s what makes our team stand out among our competitors. Our business is built and runs on this system of values, which act as pillars for our everyday interaction with our clients, and when seeking new business. We covered a few of these in detail at the beginning of the presentation, but a few worth mentioning are: Memorable experiences and enduring connections – we strive to have relationships with our clients that last many, many years. Some of our longest clients have been with us for over 10 years. I think that speaks volumes about our level of service and commitment to building strong relationships. It’s something that is really important to us. Also passion – when you talk about telecom is not always the most exciting thing in the entire world, I mean I doubt you are on the edge of your seat every moment of this webinar… but when our team starts finding efficiencies and improvements – and ultimately saving money for our clients – now that is what really lights some fire for passion for our team. Our telecom analysts are passionate about providing great service and savings.
- Another factor in finding the right fit for your organization is deciding what services a TEM firm offers, and your options in picking and choose what you need. What service options do you need, and what of those things can you handle internally? Is there flexibility in the various packages offered by a TEM vendor? This is something that is unique to Valicom, our a la carte service menu. This option means that you have the ability to choose only the services that you want and need. You won’t be paying for things that you don’t need.
- Finally, one last aspect to consider when considering a potential TEM Firm is how happy their clients are. For those of you that are already engaged with a TEM firm, this might be a gut wrenching question – but do they care what you think about them? How accessible and friendly are they? Do they answer your questions promptly and completely? It might be time to consider a TEM firm that strives to serve you while also saving you money. One of our initiatives for measuring client satisfaction is to survey them each quarter, we measure satisfaction on 8 critical components of our services. And really we’d like to think our results speak for themselves, but really… quarter after quarter – our clients are continually satisfied with their services. This last quarter was record breaking results for us, our team was scored 3.97 out of a possible 4 points. Building trust, matching values, and finding a TEM firm that is flexible and cares about your satisfaction. These are some of the major mile markers we suggest seeking out as you begin having conversations with TEM partners or firms. And as we wrap up today – we wanted to share a case study from one of our longest standing health care clients. Peter, who is the project manager for this client will share their story with us. Take it away Peter.
- Pete – to talk to the case study.
- With that, let’s wrap up our session today. Again – thank you so much for your time and attention. Please do not hesitate to reach out to me if you have any questions or feedback on our topic today.
- Call or email me anytime, here is my contact information. If you would like to set up a time to speak with our team and learn more about our services, I’m more than happy to help set it up. Be sure to follow us on our social media accounts –we are active on Twitter, LinkedIn and Google + …or check out our blog, we post telecom industry news and content twice a week. Thanks so much! Have a great day.