Empowering Your Mobile Workforce through Personal Cost Management
Mobile devices, ranging from smart phones to SIM-enabled laptops, have changed how many companies operate. Workforces are becoming more mobile, enabling more remote working and travel without a negative impact on productivity. This is a trend that will only continue as smart devices become even smarter and more connected, which is particularly the case within the Financial Services industry. Increasingly, IT departments are providing a corporate device for their staff that can be for both business and personal use. Whilst employers and employees alike are benefiting from this freedom and simplicity of having just one device, it can have an adverse impact on mobile business costs if left unmanaged. And given the highly regulated nature of Financial Services companies, the elements of compliance and governance are particularly relevant.
Some organizations choose a Personal Call Management solution to keep these costs and activities in check – this is where the employees’ personal phone usage gets tracked and charged back to them. Generally speaking, this practice can be seen negatively as it is synonymous with taking money from highly valued staff and “big-brother” penny-pinching. As a result, it’s an area that many IT departments would rather not touch. Personal Cost Management however, is a relatively new idea with origins in Personal Call Management but the two should not be confused, even though they sound very similar. The key focus of Personal Cost Management is on educating users and giving administrators the tools to implement and enforce mobile policy. Whilst automatically making salary deductions is an optional piece of functionality, it is simply one of many methods of enforcing policy.
A well-designed Personal Cost Management solution should give businesses of any size the ability to empower both users and administrators. Users are given visibility of the calls they make, the texts they send, and the data they consume each month and are notified of the cost associated with that usage. It is also possible to employ functionality within the Personal Cost Management software which, by using a call allocation engine, all inter-company and standard business numbers are automatically categorized for users. Any remaining calls can then be categorized by the user and stored in their own personal address book for automatic categorization in the future. The user can also flag whether a call was for business or personal reasons. This automation means users can quickly review their own spend, with the average user requiring less than 60 seconds to categorize their calls on a monthly basis – a very small overhead for getting a top-end smart phone with all the acquisition and fixed costs paid by the employer.
Aside from the cost allocation perspective, there is a practical and improved process element to this service. A Personal Cost Management solution enables IT Departments to communicate with all their mobile users and distribute important information, such as the Corporate Mobile Policy document. This is of particular relevance within the financial services industry as it aids compliance and governance issues. Policy acceptance can be tracked and enforced before allowing users to view their bill to ensure conformity to policy. Various tools are available to administrators to enforce policy and challenge any users who are in breach.
There are key criteria that need to be reviewed when looking at Personal Cost Management. Some solutions are very “clunky” with a primary focus on identifying personal spend; they may also require a lot of effort from users, resulting in low adoption rates. Many solutions are also tied to the network operator themselves and cannot truly provide an independent view or a portable and future-proof solution; this point is especially important when the business chooses to change supplier as all users will need to adapt to a new solution. A Personal Cost Management solution should therefore be supplier agnostic as this eases the process of changing suppliers while ensuring end users can manage their mobile costs on a single application. A target of greater than 90% of users reviewing their spend each month is sensible, as this will ensure not only that business costs are well-managed, but also that users are more aware of how they use their mobile device, which drives good accountable behavior – and that in itself is a path to reduced overall cost.
Personal Cost Management is one more way that businesses in the Financial Services sector can maintain a handle on costs, compliance and governance within their organization. Furthermore, it encourages employees to be aware of the impact their own individual actions make on the company’s bottom line, but without the need to resort to draconian “cracking the whip” measures.
Veropath’s Personal Cost Management solution uses the advanced capabilities of the Microsoft Azure cloud platform and associated tools. Azure enables the platform to process and manage big data, provide customization and easy-to-use reporting, and enables customers and partners to self-serve. The Microsoft Azure App Service enables Veropath’s Personal Cost Manager solution to incorporate different languages and currencies, and to support map visualization plus the ability to customize dashboards. A further benefit that the Azure platform enables is flexible scalability supporting SQL eDTU’s-to-scale on demand, delivering consistent end user performance.
If you would like to find out more about Veropath’s Personal Cost Management and Veropath’s full Technology Expense Management (TEM) solution, please visit www.veropath.com, or contact [email protected]. .
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