Background
ICT are a special class of IT & Digital assets that require an accurate inventory for effective financial management. Enterprises should consider the benefits of establishing a “single version of the truth” that comes from linking management of ICT and Digital assets with their other systems and processes. An accurate inventory is critical for effective financial management. Managers need accurate information that supports their business decisions. The challenges to managing ICT and Digital assets, and how an inventory can be used to support financial management of assets, are well known by the telecom managers.
Challenges
As research states, one of their top challenges identified by 47% of enterprises is inventory accuracy [source: AOTMP]. Other challenge of managing cell phones, smartphones, wireless broadband, communications and VPN service inventories is that the hardware and services are mobile. They need to be associated with users, not with physical service addresses. Changes with employees need to be reconciled to the inventory. For example, new employees join the organization, they change departments, and they leave the organization. Most enterprises have disjointed processes; different functional areas may get involved, and there is rarely a smooth hand-off from one group to another. It is also common to find functional areas within an enterprise have little to no understanding of what other groups are doing.
Solution – Building an Accurate ICT Inventory
When we build inventory, we typically capture the service address, service identifiers, service features and configurations, cost details, contract details, service provider information for voice services, data services, equipment, hardware, software, network devices, mobile devices, telecom resources, personnel, projects, and budgets in a usable format. Organizations must manage the entire end-to- end lifecycle for assets and expenses. We do not leave any area neglected, lest it have a downstream impact in terms of inefficiencies and additional costs.
In addition to physically identifying the inventory, our team digs into your invoices, which provide information regarding the amount of money spent on assets and services. However, we don’t just limit our scope of using invoices as the sole source of information to populate an inventory because invoices may contain billing errors or charges for non-existent services.
Specialized Information for Building ICT Inventories
We leave no stone unturned to gain itemized cost information about your telecom services. This require us to study service detail and that is typically available with line level service detail and itemized cost from customer service records, circuit 
catalogs, toll free ring-to catalogs, contracts, tariffs, and service guides. For e.g. in case of North American carriers, customer service records (CSRs) provide information about local services and their configurations. CSRs detail all service component configurations, component costs, and ancillary costs, such as taxes, surcharges, and service fees. Understanding each service, its configuration, and its cost empowers your telecom managers to make informed decisions.
Activities
- Implement rigorous internal controls for financial reporting
- Establish controls and employ systems that meet company’s specific needs, which may involve upgrades to help improve inventory management
- Detect unauthorized transactions, automate reconciliation of invoices to inventory, and provide more transparency for financial transactions
- Generate insightful reports that provide visibility, access to expense data, and accountability through expense charge-back
Benefits
- Budget management, forecasting, and needs assessments can be efficiently performed
- The integrated system can become the definitive baseline for all operational and financial decisions.
- Cost savings from better management of assets and service inventory
Achieve a single, centralized, consolidated version of the truth.