The increasing complexity of remote working and the role of analytics 

IT departments are under pressure to manage increasingly complex technologies and services that deliver business advantage. Remote working is one of the most complex but there still needs to be a keen focus on using actionable intelligence to better manage and innovate with ICT resources. With the right insight, it gets easier to master procurement, maximise benefit, manage cost and minimise risk.

Tollring’s iC360 suite collects and combines data from multiple telecoms carriers, locations and platforms to deliver a single up-to-date view of every fixed line and mobile asset, who it’s assigned to, and where they sit in the organisation, making it easy to monitor and manage.  It also makes things like leaver/joiner/mover administration much easier because you can instantly see every resource linked to a person, their line manager, location and cost centre.

Managers need to be sure that things are getting done
Tollring’s iC360 enables managers to create high-level views and to drill down to see what people are spending and why. They’ll have the insight they need to identify and manage behaviours, and ensure expenses are being used appropriately.

Where there is data, it can be added into the portal.  If they bring other expenses into the mix they can monitor the total cost of remote operations e.g. fuel cards, conferencing solutions.

The overall aim is to build a culture of responsible use.  Some roles will inherently generate more cost than others. Managers can set benchmarks so every individual can see their own costs against the averages of other employees and departments.

When expenses are electronically captured, it’s easy to turn the resulting data into meaningful business intelligence that you can use to monitor and control spend.

Managers achieve a centralised view of a team.  They can set alerts and alarms for the watchpoints that are meaningful to them.

The reports and analyses enable managers to:

  • Review spend and activity patterns by employee
  • Benchmark and compare spend between employees
  • Receive flags and alerts for misuse, fraud and policy breaches
  • Deliver customised reports for other areas, like Finance and Accounting and your own managers

Keeping employees in the loop

Managers can give every employee a central view of the total cost of everything they use, so they understand their impact on the business.  This helps the team to take more care since they know their actions will be counted.

There are many obvious direct costs like telephony, fuel, printing and expenses, but indirect costs can also be assigned so they can be understood. Often, one of the largest areas of an organisation’s cash consumption is travel and expenses. Unfortunately, it’s also an area that is widely exploited.

In summary, you can get off-the-shelf TEM and resource management applications, but rarely can they bring absolutely any resource that has underlying data into a centralised inventory and treat it all in context. iC360 easily overcomes one of the biggest challenges in business intelligence. It absorbs, validates and standardises data from any source, housing it in a powerful inventory that supports today’s master data management strategies.