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Importance of Portals

What is a wireless portal and why is it so important?  A portal is usually defined as a site that is positioned as an entrance to other sites. 

Wireless portals are generally a path or mechanism to purchase a new wireless device.  If you go to one of the carriers’ web sites (their portal) you have the ability to look at phones, plans, and perhaps accessories, to make selections, and “check out” or complete your purchase.  If you wanted to compare carrier A with carrier B, or C and D you need to visit each site independently to make comparisons.

Independent portals offered by master agencies provide multiple carriers on one site, and perhaps do comparisons, and purchases on the site, although selection and price will be restricted to carriers in which that agency has established agreements.

TeleBright’s wireless portals enable clients to establish control across their enterprise providing policy and corporate catalogs to employees. Determine:

• which vendors employees can use
• which voice and data plans
• and which accessories 

This gives a customizable wireless portal that employees can access to select their wireless device and plan, while management maintains complete control.  This centrally managed control point can deploy a system that employees acquire without dependence on your valuable resources. 

Integrating the portal with ManageRight enables an automatic maintenance of wireless inventory, cost allocations, budgets, expense validations, and cost optimizations.  The combined solution is customized to adhere to acquisition workflow and single or multi-level approval processes.  The platform is deployed and enabled with the organization’s wireless environment including approved carrier’s contracted pricing, special terms, approved devices and plans, features, accessories and personnel to global policy factors.

TeleBright Customized Portal Benefits:

• Fully integrated expense management supporting the entire wireless lifecycle.
• Plan and device comparisons, procurement, asset inventory, policy enforcement, invoice processing, expense allocations, and daily usage alerts.
• User based trouble ticket entry platform, reducing burden on IT staff.
• Reduces wireless expenses.
• Streamlines operational workflow.
• Allocates requisition/acquisition costs at the employee, business unit or enterprise level.
• Optimizes plans at a pooled level (portal directs the selection of corporate plans).
• Manages device inventory at SIM card levels.
• Improves business process automation with policy enforcement controls.
• Pre-sets detailed approvals for all plans, devices, at each staff level based on their position and/or line of business requirements.

*TeleBright offers exclusive patented wireless monitoring and notification. *Real-time contract updates, plans, phones, promotions, special pricing, upgrade and optimization notifications.

Employee/User Benefits:

• Questions answered in one location.
• All wireless carrier offerings in one location.
• Orders are placed online in a secure and user friendly environment.
• Contracted rates applied to wireless equipment and monthly plans.
• All eligible discounts from carriers are visible.
• Requisition fulfillment and order management implemented within carriers systems.
• All time sensitive promotions are available.
• User plan threshold encroachment notifications.
• Upgrade notifications.
• Optimization notifications.

Company Benefits:

• Ability to provide a valuable employee benefit.
• Additional wireless lines increase company lines, increasing discounts from carriers.
• Complete lifecycle approval and notification mechanism (BrightCare/PlanGuard).
• All requisitions and MACDs contained in a centralized management system.
• Issue and opportunity notifications.
• Industry best practice and optimization notifications.
• Global to individual utilization reporting with exceptions and policy violations.
• Reduce burden of IT/telecom staff with self-serve trouble ticketing, research, requisition and account management.

TeleBright’s portal architecture is designed to support user transactions across multiple carriers with appropriate approvals and workflow. Each portal can be customized to suit the business needs for wireless devices, services, providers, invoices, disputes, assets, etc. Policy can be customized and enforced at any level within the organization. TeleBright has operated a wireless portal since 2002 in partnership with Consumer Reports.

Are you paying more then 5 cents per minute for wireless voice?  Are you allowing employees to expense their business related wireless costs?  Are you buying unlimited data plans but don’t know how many MB/month are actually needed?  Is your company’s wireless cost-per-user going up instead of down?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, this article can help you bring your wireless costs down and add money directly to your bottom line.

Cellular usage and market penetration are at an all time high and the use of text messaging has sky rocketed.   Here are some baseline statistics:

• There are 220+ million U.S. subscribers and 2 billion subscribers worldwide.
• In the U.S. alone, 1.7 trillion wireless minutes were used in 2006
• There were 12.5 billion text messages sent in June 2006.
• There were 1.1 billion multimedia messages (MMS) sent in the first half of 2006 -- that’s more then were sent in all of 2005.
• Carrier revenue from data services rose 70% in the first half of 2006.

The best way to gain control is by managing your existing plans and inventory and adopt and enforce a wireless policy to ensure that all new wireless spending is as efficient as possible.

Implementing a plan to optimize your wireless costs is never easy.  While there is no single plan of action that will work for all companies, there are some simple steps that most can benefit from.

• Identify any internal organization issues and get management support before working to try and correct them.  Make sure that the group tasked with the responsibility to enact change has the authority to enforce
• Create a comprehensive inventory of all user’s devices and plans.  Identify lines that can be cancelled immediately such as former employees and lost phones.
• Migrate from employee liable to corporate liable contracts whenever possible. 
• Standardize the list of allowable devices, carriers and service plans.  If possible, adopt a wireless portal or other technology to ensure compliance.

The suggestions mentioned in this article are the most basic ones you can take.  TeleBright has the knowledge and technology in place to make sure your get the most for your wireless dollar.  Contact us today to see just how much we can help you save.

TeleBright is excited to announce the Aberdeen Group has released Wireless Cost Management. TeleBright sponsored this important research and key performance indicators. Download your FREE copy today.

We are proud to announce the newest releases to ManageRight. Enjoy these wonderful new improvements!

• Added archived functionality to inventory.
• Enhanced detail for auto approval privilege to inventory.
• Expanded MACD details.
• Improved email invoice functionality.
• Heightened the level of detail in reports.