Finding Cost Efficiencies in your Mobility Program Starts with a SaaS Reporting Platform
Enterprises today are facing increasing costs to provide cellular tools to their infrastructure and workforce. Per CTIA, data usage surged 82% in 2018 from the previous year. This trend is projected to continue as month consumption per smartphone will approach 20GB within the next three years as faster networks, faster devices and more applications are deployed. Wireless carrier per GB rates have been dropping but not enough to offset the increases in usage leading to an overall increase in wireless costs.
Below are strategies, when utilized, that will help your mobility program find cost efficiencies:
- CIO’s are responsible for controlling what technologies and vendors are deployed that determine the effective per unit costs of those solutions and their support. However, it’s the business units that ultimately control the quantity of services being consumed. A partnership must be created between the CIO organization and lines of business to effectively control the overall costs of a mobility program. This partnership is required to effectively manage the enterprise cost of mobility, to understand usage trends as they begin to develop and spot behavior patterns in employees or entire departments. Having an understanding of how departments consume services also allows for checks and balances in regards to the corporate mobile use policies.
- A comprehensive Enterprise Mobility Program includes reporting as a best practice for partnering with business to jointly manage wireless costs. Monthly reports should be pushed via email and should also be available to various stakeholders to be pulled from a reporting portal. Key to the reporting effectiveness is easily identifiable information on usage and cost trends. Try not to over complicate the reports as viewers will typically glance at the report.
- Manager reports should identify top users in data consumption, roaming, and international long distance. Permissions should exist that allow for visibility to only those devices that roll into the manager’s organization.
- Individual employee reports are helpful especially when spend or consumption thresholds are exceeded. A report sent to an employee and their manager when monthly costs exceed $200 will highlight excessive higher than normal usage.
- Trending information and benchmarking data is helpful to understand how an individual and/or a departments usage compares. These reference points bring perspective to costs and usage data.
- Having a published Mobility Policy which details acceptable wireless use parameters can specifically support the format and content of your wireless reporting. Referring back to the published policy will bring it full circle as an effective communications tool.
- Data privacy is a very important consideration for any wireless program. Enterprises must take action to ensure their data reporting processes meet data privacy policies and guidelines. In this age of consumers demanding more privacy regarding the use and sharing of their personal information, recent laws and changes in data compliance have created a global effect and hyper-awareness of data privacy for all consumers and businesses are paying attention. In May of 2018 the European Union enacted the Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which essentially created a new global standard for how personal information is collected, stored and shared.
- More Data Privacy Laws– The state of California has also recently passed a consumer privacy law called the California Consumer Privacy Act which grants California residents new rights regarding their personal information. The law allows CA residents to be informed about what kinds of personal data companies have collected on them and why it was collected. For both laws, consumers have the right to request deletion of their personal information, opt out of the sale of their personal information, and have access what personal data has been collected on them. Failure to comply with these regulations can be expensive and time consuming.
OVATION Wireless Management’s SaaS Reporting Platform
OVATION’s Magellan SaaS solution is GDPR compliant, supports over 200 global carrier formats, multi-currency, multi-lingual and is ISO 27001 certified. Magellan provides dashboard reporting on spend and consumption trends, emailed usage reports, a configurable provisioning catalog, asset management module, approval workflow and custom report generation capabilities. We also integrate with ServiceNow and other procurement platforms.
Our Managed Services include invoice loading, optimization, fulfillment, help desk, device logistics and project management. There are no requirements to utilize our managed services but we highly recommend utilization of our Magellan platform in any Enterprise Mobility program.
Contact OVATION today for a discussion on how our SaaS reporting platform may be the right fit to help augment your internal mobility program.