I always get questions as to how I can achieve favorable rates or terms in tough situations. The best thing I can advise is to remember that the people you work with in the company you purchase from have to earn your respect and know they can trust you. There are many ways to achieve this and each person or group responds differently, but if you can build this trust you will have a voice inside that company that helps you in sticky situations or helps you achieve favorable terms in contract negotiations.

With the holidays rapidly approaching, it is a good time to recap where you stand with your suppliers and determine if you need any extra efforts to help enter 2011. Did any of your supplier’s sales team give you extra effort to get you out of a jamb in 2010? Did any of them go beyond their responsibility to help you close a deal? Did you fall short of any promises you made to a sales team but they still stood by your side? Any of these things might be a good reason to send an extra thanks or personal note.

Lastly, don’t forget the individuals that work on the account behind the scenes. Sending a holiday card to the sales engineer or the AR accounting clerk will strengthen your overall relationship with the supplier. Better yet, send a note to the individual’s boss telling them the good work they did for you. These are small things you can do to help conditions lean your way when it comes time for the critical negotiations in 2011.

Happy Holidays!
The Tidal Telecom Team

1. Ask your current providers about their competition.  All companies will compare themselves to what they believe is their largest competitor.  Flushing out this information from your current wholesale providers will give you a good start to finding alternate companies to contract with.  If you do not have any current wholesale providers, you can still use this strategy once you find at least one or two wholesale providers by asking them how they compare to their closest competitor.
2. Use the Internet.  If you landed here, then odds are you know how to use the internet to do searches.  The big problem, however, will be too much information or searches riddled with spam sites.  For example, if you try searching for something like wholesale IPod’s you will get 100’s of useless sites.  The key to using searches on the internet is to find industry related forums or member sites that will help lead you to legitimate wholesale providers for the services you need.  If you think you have a legitimate company but are unsure, then try searching for comments, reviews, or discussions about that company.  For almost any industry, you can be certain you will find discussions about suppliers and the procurement of services for that industry.
3. Review your contacts and find ones that are in like industries or that are in companies that would use similar services and ask them about their wholesale providers.  Even if the product is not the same, it can still sometimes help you generate an initial list.  For example, content delivery companies, CLECs, call centers, and web hosting companies would all share a need for telecommunications services.  If you had a contact at any one of these types of companies you could probably get a good list of telecommunication providers to start your own list.
4. Lastly, reverse engineer.  Whatever product or service you are building there is probably a competitor already doing it.  Look at their product or service and try to determine where they procure their services and supplies.  You can find clues in financial records, press releases, manufacturing processes, or sometimes in the product fine print.

Finding new wholesale providers can be a daunting task, however, a good search and proper follow up can lead you to good providers that will help make your product a success.  Spend the time to do proper research, if you do not have that time then higher a company to help you.  Finding the right wholesale provider should be an integral part your business and one that can have large impacts to product delivery if not done correctly.  Good Luck!

1. New products.  The telecom product space changes almost daily.  You can spend millions of dollars designing the perferct billing system and have it all fall apart when you introduce a new product.
2. Mergers.  Companies like Verizon and ATT have bought so many companies that they have 100′s of billing systems to integrate.  It is hard enough to design one system, when you have to integrate 100′s of them you are bound to have invoicing problems.
3. Rate structures.  No product or pricing fits everyone and as a result it is common to find modifications to pricing structures that the billing systems can’t handle.
4. Overabundance of information.  When ordering new services, there are so many pieces of information to get the service right it is hard for a billing system (unless very well designed) that can contain that information correctly.
5. Order changes.  Every company has them.  An office move, new users, more/less bandwidth needs, etc.  When you make changes to a service that it already installed the billing systems often fail.  That is why you see so many problems with subscription services and circuit order changes.
6. Human error.  At the end of the day the data is only as good as the person that enters it.

So with so many potential areas for errors, how can you help minimize the chance of errors on your invoices?

1. Always provide complete information on the service orders.  Often companies will work with a technical team to install services and forget to put the correct details on the service order.  This can cause unexpected billing problems in the future.  Always double check your information and make sure it mirrors what your technical team is doing.
2. Make sure the pricing is clear and detailed in either your contract or service order.  Often, pricing in the service order is complex and if modified from the original format can cause problems.  Putting examples in the documents helps a lot.  Make sure all services you will be using are quoted and clearly define what services apply to what discount.
3. Follow procedures with the Telecom companies.  If they prefer you to put an order in their online tool, best advice is to use it plus whatever other methods you use.  There is never providing to much information to the telecom provider.  If a dispute should arise, this is also you best course of protection.  We have seen dispute denied even though the customer account team worked on the change but the customer failed to sign one piece of paper or fill our the proper form.

There will always be errors in telecom invoicing that you will not be able to minimize.  The best you can do is properly document your purchases and make sure you audit your invoices on a monthly basis.  If you follow the three steps above, it will go a long way to helping you avoid large disputes with your telecom vendors.

Julius Genachowski, with the support of several Internet advocacy groups, has backed net neutrality as a way to prevent the telephone and cable TV firms, who are big Internet service providers, from favoring some Internet content or services over others.

“Users, not Internet service providers, need to decide what services get on the Internet,” Genachowski told the Broadband Summit at the U’s Carlson School of Management. “The Internet’s open architecture encouraged investment, innovation and access to information and ideas. That’s very important, and we should continue that.”

If you have been following this battle, you would know that Google, Verizon, and most of the large ISPs are against net neutrality.  There is a lot of money at stake.  Controlling content is big money for ISP’s and network providers.  For example, without net neutrality, a company like Verizon could restrict searches on their network to only Google and Yahoo, monopolizing their revenue streams.  If you want to use MSN, to bad.  Would they do this?  It is hard to say since the consumer would demand net neutrality and there would be a lot of push back on something that extreme.

The biggest challenge to net neutrality in recent months is access to bandwidth.  Gamers, large peer to peer networks, and soon to be more and more HD video streaming require tremendous bandwidth and network needs.  The large ISPs want to restrict access or slow down access to sites with such content as the network demand is costly and the large needs of a few hurt the many.

For the consumer, what net neutrality means is no restrictions imposed on; content, sites, platforms, kinds of equipment to connect, and modes of communication, by government, companies, or any other entity.

It sounds simple and a basic but there are valid arguments on both sides.  Internet access should be unrestricted, but who pays for extreme bandwidth users?  If you allow limits and restriction, how do you prevent abuse like filtering content of sites that can’t pay for preferred access?  Constructing a policy around this will be a difficult battle for either side you sit on, but plan for something to happen as bandwidth and telecom needs keep increasing with new technology.

Why Use a TEM system?

There are many reasons an organization would choose to use a TEM system. The primary reason is that a TEM system creates a centralized database of all telecom orders, pricing, contracts, and inventory. This may seem like a small benefit, but in today’s business environment, supporting the needs of customers requires a lot more technology supported by all types of telecom items. When your inventory is centralized in one database, it is easier to keep track of all purchases to control waste and most importantly centralize purchasing power to negotiate lower overall rates.

One of the most common and wasteful purchases companies make are cell phones. Small and large companies can quickly add 100′s of lines with dozens of providers creating a complex web of invoices, plans, and equipment. The benefit of a TEM system would allow one person to manage all the inventory and make sure all cell plans are the most efficient for each users, equipment is accounted for and replaced correctly, and invoices are accurate with actual inventory. Most companies without some for of TEM system can easily see 20-30% higher cell phone costs from waste or inaccurate billing.

Who uses TEM Systems?

A lot of companies use TEM systems instead of a large staff to manage the processing and auditing of telecom budgets. Both large and small companies can benefit as pricing is usually predicated on the number of items managed giving small companies the benefits without a major technology spend that large companies could afford.

How are TEM systems integrated?

Most TEM systems are outsourced hosted solutions, meaning there is a service provider that maintains the application on hosted equipment. Access to the system is usually through a secure web site. More integration can be achieved if needed, for example, direct feeds into the TEM system from your accounts payable system to automatically update invoice processing. There are some companies that offer TEM system software that you host on your servers, but due to the complex nature of telecom inventory it is often difficult to realize the benefits without a strong staff from the TEM system provider customizing the integration.

There are many additional benefits of using a TEM system. Tidal Telecom provides these services through a industry leader that offers complete managed solutions. If you choose, we can have your telecom invoices validated, processed, and paid through the TEM provider leaving you with more time for more important projects. Visit our site www.Tidaltelecom.com to learn more.