Telecom management has always been a little bit like a game of whack-a-mole. You conduct an audit, build an inventory, think that you have everything straight and 6 months later, you have little to no trust in what you did and have to start over. I have searched for telecom management solutions for quite a while and have come up with a couple criteria that I think will help telecom managers.

First, you need a data base that can accommodate telecom inventory. This is actually a pretty tall order, since telecom inventory is very complex and different carriers use different naming conventions and different bundling options that can mask some features. I have found that tracking a circuit at its highest common denominator is best, and then add the specific features that you care about in the detail. Trying to capture everything is, in my view, not a great use of time. So you would capture all the business lines as such, without regard to whether they are Centrex, 1mbs, used for DSL, etc. You capture that info in the details of the service.On the wireless side of the house, I like tracking by device type – no special reason, it just seems to be the way people discuss wireless service.

Second, location data base. This can be part of your telecom inventory, but it becomes a bit of a challenge when you have two locations for a WAN connection or lots of inventory in a single location, so having separate relational data bases seems to work best.

Third, a billing database. You need to track billing information so you can follow which circuit is billed on what account. It is not that hard to include this in the circuit inventory, so that is an option, but it gets more complicated if you want to track down to the subaccount level.

Lastly, you need some sort of reporting function. The requests for “show me what we have at location X,” or “can we get a detail list of what we have with carrier Y” are not that frequent, but when they do occur, you can spend a lot of time trying to pull together an updated list.

Telecom Management Tools

You can keep these details in a spreadsheet (which is what I have seen the most) – but you really need to have SharePoint if more than one person is going to use it, or build a database in Access or something similar, but if you do not already have access and know how to use it (I don’t) that can be a pain. So, the last option is to get a database tool.

There are a lot of telecom management providers in the market that want to sell you their inventory management tool. We looked at several; most thought $100k in monthly telecom bills was too small for their application. We did come across my-tem, which provides a free version of a tool. It has some limitations, but the price is right! If you are looking for a tool to assist in managing your telecom inventory, start with my-tem – you can always upgrade later to a paid service once you understand what is needed. If you are interested in telecom management, you can give it a try here…

Telecom Management Tools