Not too long ago I had the opportunity to learn just how much I didn’t know about the cost of owning and maintaining a telephone system. Oh, I knew about the acquisition cost, and the costs of a maintenance plan to cover the equipment, the upgrades to voice mail and on hold messaging. Not to mention the cost of the many phone lines we need to provide sufficient band-width for telephone use in our company.
While looking at this cost center in budgeting for 2011, what I found out was that I had absolutely no visibility into what this asset is actually used for. Certainly I thought it was intuitive that it would be used for business purposes, but it became clear that there was no certainty to that assumption, and that I really had no idea what was actually happening, nor any resource to help me gain greater visibility to answer the questions. Thusly, I had no real control over the cost center.
Our customers have the same issue with printed page production. Our Managed Cost Program has historically provided insight into the environment down to the device level, and micro metric information to that end. But up to now, we have not had visibility into what your internal clients have actually been using the printers for. That level of insight leads to a much, much higher level of management control over the cost center. Wouldn’t that be interesting?
We are currently testing a solution that we plan to launch in Q1, 2011, that will incorporate this level of insight into the management tools our Managed Cost Program already contains. We think you will find the insights useful and valuable in managing this cost center. Look for our announcement early next year!
Happy Holidays
MS