Wetware Solutions
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Recently at a client site, I witnessed a proactive IT manager cut her company’s overhead by making a couple of phone calls. She was auditing phone charges and discovered that her bosses had been paying for phone lines that they weren’t using. It turns out that the phone system they had in place didn’t require extra analog lines for faxing. That was missed initially because the right people didn’t have the right information. The error was caught, at last, because an IT manager who had learned more about how the phone system worked had started scrutinizing the connections and auditing expenses. She took the time to match phone line to function. When a couple of lines led to no equipment, she called her equipment vendor to confirm that the lines weren’t required. She then called her provider and canceled the lines, saving her company over $600 per month.

Unnecessary expenses like these are easy to miss in any business, large or small. The systems are complicated, and oversight by trained individuals is often lacking as personnel change and equipment gets updated. Suddenly, that analog line that ran everything doesn’t do anything. For this reason, telco equipment is the worst. Even great IT managers will understandably tend to leave the telco engineering to vendors and service providers, taking it on faith that new systems were set up correctly; or that updates to older systems will be followed up with dropped charges for discontinued services and equipment.

But once you’ve spent enough time administering a system and have learned some of the ins and outs, you need to start asking questions. What does this do? Do we really need this? Can someone else provide the same thing for less?

With economic recovery still eluding us, now is the time for businesses and individuals to scrutinize their operating costs. If you’re paying for it, make sure you’re using it, and get rid of it if you aren’t. While you’re at it, contact your service providers to see which ones are willing to lower costs to keep your business. Competition is stiff all over, and with VoIP and cable companies now offering phone services, AT&T and other big telcos are lowering some costs. You’d be surprised how little it takes to trim the bottom line.