How to Maintain an Accurate IT and Telecom Inventory

3 Key Benefits of Maintaining Accurate IT and Telecom Inventory

Whether you have a spreadsheet or a Technology Expense Management application, here are 3 key reasons to always ensure you maintain an accurate inventory.

Here’s a free template on how to create a telecom inventory

1. Captures and stores information about who, what, when, where and why. Your detailed IT and telecom inventory should capture the story behind why the inventory exists. 

For example capture:

• The service (carrier ID and internal reference ID) location detail, costs, vendor name, customer names, mobile device type, hardware model, circuit capacity, network support SLA and contract end dates.
• If possible, aim to capture details around who the service is used by their relevant business unit and cost center.
• In addition, any details you can note down around why the service was ordered and what the service is used for will come in handy during network performance related issues.

** Caution: Depending on the size of your inventory, if you don’t have a TEM solution, the information being held in your spreadsheet is always up for scrutiny. It may be out of date, and if you share it with someone else as “a source of truth,” it may be wrong if you’re not on top of who has ownership of maintain the spreadsheet.  You also run the risk of the file being too large to open, share or quite frankly manage.

2. Source of Truth to perform invoice validation.  Now that you’ve captured your detailed inventory, use this as a way to validate your supplier invoices.

Validating your supplier invoices should be performed down to the line item charge level.  (e.g. mobile plan, usage, access, port, router, etc.)  You’ll want to avoid an “order of magnitude” approach of a simple list of account numbers amounts and spot checks on whether the account has been paid before and “if the amounts are close we approve…”  scary stuff.

• Leverage your inventory to perform:
  • Service ID checks (can this be found in the inventory, can this be found on the invoice)?
  • Do the amounts match?
  • Have all disconnected services stopped billing?
  • Submit disputes

** Caution: If you’re able to maintain your inventory new order, disconnects, and changes (MACD) across your inventory your monthly invoice validation checks should be “simple.”  However, this one can be tricky if you’re managing your inventory in excel.  You’ll need to establish a way to run a VLOOKUP formula across specific areas, run this across all suppliers, across multiple formats mostly pdfs, currencies AND monthly…good luck.

3. Transparency into Network Optimization Opportunities

Now that you have your inventory story you should be in a better position to optimize your network on an on-going basis.  (We say should because any inventory is as good as the data that is captured AND how that data is maintained.) As you think through ways to optimize your network here are just a few ideas to consider:

1. Identification of out of contract services available for renewals
2. Disconnection of un-used services
3. Network overlap
4. Capacity right sizing
5. Voice usage cost optimization
6. Mobile plan optimization
7. Identification of hardware end of life kit or out of maintenance support
8. Data Center space and power optimization

Maintaining your technology inventory is the key to your ability to always understand your network.  Your success relies on your approach to 1 – creating a source of the truth and 2 – how the information is maintained.

Our personal opinion is you will only be able to go so far in excel / Google Spreadsheet and is a nonstarter for large enterprises.  If you’re still interested in learning more about building an inventory, check out our post on “How to create a telecom inventory.”

Here’s a free template on how to create a telecom inventory

Check out how to manage telecom inventory in Temforce

Temforce is a Technology Expense Management SaaS that simplifies maintaining your inventory, spend and suppliers without the hassle of spreadsheets.

If you’re interested in learning more about Temforce invoice validation contact us