Telecoms costs have shot-up over the past few years, driven by the increase in wireless technology and every company is looking to manage and reduce these costs without impacting on levels of service or infrastructure and at the same time obtain or maintain competitive advantage through this key media. PCMG’s range of Services are geared to generating cash from historic expenditure and improving margins going forward.
Recovery Audit
With increasing pressures on cost control, many corporate finance professionals are seeing the benefits of a thorough, independent telecommunications audit.
In our experience, the complexity of billing arrangements with BT and the myriad other suppliers makes overcharging almost inevitable. We specialise in securing refunds for our clients across the full spectrum of charges, ranging from PSTN calls and Freephone services through to Data Networks, equipment rental, installation and maintenance charges.
With expert analysts, technical specialists, software developers and ex-BT billing specialists and engineers on our payroll, we can examine and validate every aspect of the billing process. Our investigations have identified many deficiencies in suppliers’ billing systems and we have established precedents with them in resolving previous cases – all of which gives us invaluable experience in obtaining the maximum financial benefit for our clients. Areas we routinely review include;
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PSTN Calls & Rental Charges
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Freephone Services
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Featurenet
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Private Circuits & VPN
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Equipment Rental
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Maintenance Charges
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Mobiles
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Wholesale
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Interconnect Areas
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Physical Site Validations
Quite simply, PCMG is the acknowledged UK market leader in the field of telecommunications auditing and our combined expertise far outstrips that of our nearest competitors. What this means in practice is you can be confident we will use every possible resource to minimise your costs, boost your profits and help you to maintain a competitive edge.
Margin Assurance
Industry studies show that communication providers leak 5-15% of gross revenues – with an entire industry geared to supporting the CP’s in reducing these losses.
As with our Recovery Audit service, PCMG adds value when our clients and their service providers have exhausted their resource, technology and expertise. In short, we specialise in transforming and manipulating vast amounts of data and interrogating the outputs with our specialist industry colleagues to identify leakage areas, recover monies where appropriate and implement resolutions.
We focus on a number of key areas where we can add most value, including;
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NTS & Revenue Share
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Billing & Mediation
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Interconnect
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Financial & Regulatory
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Contract Control
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Fraud & Arbitrage
Traditional solutions simply can not provide the analytical agility or ‘deep-dive’ delivered by our experienced colleagues which allows us to identify more errors, recover more monies and share knowledge with our clients to prevent future leakage.
Optimisation
According to the Aberdeen Group ‘Quick Fixes To Cut Telecom Costs’ paper of November 2009, companies employing centralised management of assets and services were able to deliver;
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21% decrease in mobile spend
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22% decrease in landline WAN spend
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36% decrease in landline voice spend
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15% reduction in FTE’s to manage telecom overheads
Our Optimisation services are designed to bring clarity to your overall telecom expenditure through building an inventory of current assets, services and usage profiles, and then exploiting this inventory to drive costs out through a range of managed services which include;
• Inventory and asset management – Once an initial inventory is built, it is only effective to the point your next asset is procured or cancelled. Ongoing, we manage your fixed and mobile assets and services through processing and consolidating multiple-carrier invoices within our central repository.
• Ordering and provisioning management – manage your Moves, Additions, Deletions & Changes (MADC’s) across your network services and mobile assets, based on agreed contracts between you and your suppliers. This can include catalogues, help desk for order placement and logistics support related to deployment and repair/replacement, and of course maintaining the Inventory.
• Usage management - using call accounting and invoice data to provide a comprehensive view of services and usage. Managed by individual, department, cost centre or location across any number of corporate products, services and locations, Usage Management also identifies no/low-use services and abuse of services.
• Invoice dispute management – a real-time recovery audit service. Comparing your expenditure with contracted rates across multiple carriers, any disputes are centrally managed via a web-enabled claims management portal.
• Benchmarking – based upon your individual services and usage profiles, our benchmarking process provides a clear view of your current rates, terms and agreements in comparison with the ever-changing marketplace, This benchmark then allows you to re-negotiate with your existing service providers and/or transfer all or some services to new partners – processes we can support you with.
• Reporting and business intelligence – on-line presentation of your real-time telecom data, through a series of bespoke dashboards and KPI’s. Examples of reporting includes trending, costs v’s budget, usage profiling, validation of services and alerting – all searchable by individuals, costs centres, locations and business units. This functionality allows business functions, such as IT, HR and finance to generate data that can be acted on.
Click here to download the PCMG Telecom Service Overview data sheet.