Life Cycle Management

Life Cycle Management (LCM) is primarily a solution chosen by our larger and multi-location customers. It offers Bill Payment, General Ledger coding, auditing of billing plus recovery of overcharges, including for discovery of disconnected services still on your billing, a web-based inventory of every service, from every service provider, down to the line-item detail of every line, circuit, or service, for any type of wireline and wireless services, and comes with a 24/7 help desk. The level of detail that is provided in the web-based inventory makes it easy to provide a faster response to any service issues, track SLA’s, and layer on management and monitoring of your services and equipment.

LCM Functionality vs TEM

Both LCM and TEM systems offer bill payment and general ledger coding, but with most TEM platforms, that is where their process starts and ends. LCM offers a much better auditing process than is available from Telecom Expense Management (TEM) platforms. This is because TEM systems generally present only a billing inventory of wireline services. Because we have created such a detailed inventory of all services at all locations, a much more robust and comprehensive audit can be conducted to identify both incorrect charges but also services you are being charged for but should not be on your bill.

Life Cycle Management will also create an inventory of your service provider agreements. Those agreements will be analyzed to document your obligations down to this same level of line-item detail for all services at all locations.

The combination of understanding what you have for both services and the underlying commitments in those service provider’s agreements, organized in a format that competitive analysis can be undertaken, allows us to be able to provide a much more complete level of optimization of services and technology options. Billing inventories, without this level of inventory detail of services and contract commitments, do not enable clients to facilitate this type of optimization.

Another key differentiator of LCM vs. TEM is that it provides 24/7 help desk, supports move, add, changes, and deletes, and offers field service techs to go on-site to implement any solution you wish installed. TEM platforms do not provide optimization of services, or project managers to manage the process of quoting, ordering, and implementing the optimization recommendations you choose. Cost reductions of 20-45% can be generated using this platform. While TEM platforms can accomplish many useful tasks for bill consolidation and cost allocation, they are not designed for these functions.