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April 21, 2010
Guest Blog: Earth Day and Telecom Expense Management
My friends over at Telesoft sent me the following:
With Earth Day falling on April 22, it’s only befitting to take a closer look at some of the ways Telecom Expense Management (TEM) programs can help organizations save money on their fixed and mobile expenses, all while contributing to a cleaner environment. Carriers, including AT&T and Verizon, often provide incentives to switch from paper to electronic billing, such as tree planting in your company’s name. While the number one goal of a TEM program is to save money by creating visibility into the enterprise’s telecom expenditures, TEM solutions also provide the ability for the enterprise to improve the environment by “going green” with automated paperless billing, which in turn saves organizations money.
Every ton of paper that is recycled saves 7,000 gallons of water, 380 gallons of oil and 3,700 pounds of lumber—enough electricity to power an average house for six months. A ton of paper invoices may seem like a large volume of paper bills, but it is the equivalent of 222,841 sheets of office paper. You’d probably be surprised to learn the average Fortune 500 Company spends more than $100 million on telecommunications services each year. Consequently, most of those bills are hard copies that can often be thousands of pages long.
TEM programs can also help in some less obvious ways by helping to identify services and equipment that are no longer needed. In some cases, unplugging unnecessary hardware and network devices can provide energy savings. In other cases, telecom carriers are reallocating underutilized services to customers that need these services. Much like energy providers seek to avoid building new plants by getting customers to cut back during peak usage, network service providers can avoid buying new hardware by reallocating existing resources. TEM programs provide the capabilities to optimize existing services and identify unused services.
Today many enterprises are making an effort to make their business processes more environmentally friendly through reallocating savings in their telecom budgets to areas that improve the environment. Others are reinvesting in technology, such as video conferencing, which will reduce air travel, or funding new initiatives that allow employees to work from home—all of which reduce emissions—in an attempt to take the organization one step closer to being more environmentally aware.