Individual Liable Vs Corporate Liable - Which Is Best For Your Enterprises Wireless Environment?

Corporate Captains are asking themselves which is the best way for my company to get the greatest bang for our wireless bucks, Individual Liable (IL - employee owned cell phones & Smartphones) or Corporate Liable (CL). Some business Smartphones are reaching the cost of laptops while the population of wireless devices is escalating in many corporate inventories even during this dark economic downturn. In some companies cell phone/BlackBerry/smartphones can account for hundreds if not thousands of devices. Determining the optimum approach for controlling, managing, and paying for such services could literally save or cost your company a mint.
Your telecom team needs to consider the advantages for both approaches. Then you can decide which strategy is best for your enterprise, providing the best performance indicators and the most advantageous budgetary considerations.
Individual Liable Advantages
Corporate Split Liability is a strategy which may provide some advantages for a few businesses. Advantage may occur if corporate policy requires the employee to pay for a large portion of the monthly recurring and equipment charges. In this way the business may mitigate gains other wised realized by pooling, volume negotiated contracts, ETF waivers, equipment/device/accessory and feature discount offsets under the CL model.

• Employee is largely responsible for device selection and will likely have greater personal satisfaction with the device selected.
• Employee may be more careful with personally owned equipment while being more restrained from continually updating to the newest more expensive technology (which could also be a liability from a productivity and efficiency standpoint).
• A major consideration was a Tax related until recently. These issues are no longer any advantage after the change in tax laws in fall of 2010. Cell Phones are no longer a taxable benefit and no longer need to be tracked and accounted for.

Corporate Liable Advantages
It is essential to leverage your corporate wireless device population for maximum wireless plan and equipment discounts resulting in terrific savings as you improve your contract terms. For example:

• Negotiated discounted or free feature/equipment benefits (I.E. texting, data plans, phone equipment and accessories).
• CL Corporate discounts with an additional negotiated enterprise discount.
• ETF (Early Termination Fee's) waiver concessions may provide your enterprise a large number of permitted devise early terminations without standard penalty fees.

A corporate decision maker needs to ask, why a business would prefer to pay standard consumer rates for a carriers wireless devices. Losing the significant pricing and term advantage their volume of devices will afford.
It is easy to see with such advantages that the CL savings per device could easily exceed $30 a month. If your company had 1,000 devices in your inventory you would be looking at minimally $360,000 in annual savings.

• CL combined with wireless expense management (WEM) solutions will provide automation, centralization and visibility into wireless usage, trends, and spend, while expediting procurement, help desk services, bill pay processes, optimization and cost avoidance services.
• Optimizing pooling plans will minimize your cost per device while maximizing your device usage, super-sizing your savings potential. Combining Wireless Expense Management (WEM) cost avoidance/optimization with cost/time efficiencies will produce significantly better results than the $30 per device savings described in the scenario above.
• Corporate control of your cell phones/smartphones/wireless devices. It is likely not beneficial to your enterprise for the telephone numbers your client's are conditioned to call, leaving with former employees (IL scenario).
• A centralized corporate policy and an automated approval of all wireless assets will permit only devices into corporate inventory that are useful to your employees and commensurate with their roles and responsibilities.
• Better carrier or WEM Help Desk support providing time/cost efficiencies not received by the IL customer who will have to remain on the phone to resolve the issues on which they require assistance.
• Possible security issues. An IL device connected to the corporate network will be monitored and managed by either your WEM solution provider or internal IT. Without CL corporate control, the device will not be approved for access to the company network. The concern is the employee owns the wireless equipment/smart phone/cell phone; however, the company has ownership of all required corporate data and applications. Proprietary info and protecting corporate network infrastructure will be increasingly difficult exasperated by numerous IL users possibly given such critical access.

Our analysis concludes; CL places the load of wireless management on the company's shoulders. However, that is really the only disadvantage. For the CL program to be truly cost-effective, it needs to be managed either with internal resources utilizing an automated WEM solution or outsourced to a WEM solution provider. Centralization and automation of the life-cycle management of your wireless assets is critical to the cost/usage/time optimization and efficiency required to provide maximum savings ensuring the Corporate Liable advantage.
As information is power, the advantage is now yours. If the CL advantage makes sense for you and your telecom team; Corporate Liable is likely an authentic key to your company's telecom cost reduction strategies.
Let us know how we can help.

Gary is the Business Development Manager for Integrity Communications. With a wealth of telecom marketing experience, Gary provides useful insights for those seeking help with various telecom cost reduction strategies as they work to improve their telecom teams efficiencies concerning their business' telecom environment.

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