Enterprise Mobility Management: When Carrier Portals Are Not Enough

All companies – whether a large multinational or a mid-sized organization – have some sort of mobility landscape to manage. Unless you work in a vacuum or off the grid, your employees have their own devices, and perhaps some you issued as well.

Many businesses attempt to eke by managing mobile devices and plans on their own. But how do you know when it’s time to “phone a friend” for extra support? These 13 questions will help you determine when it’s time to move beyond self-serve carrier portals and get help from a managed mobility service (MMS) provider:

1. Do you have more than one mobility or wireless provider?
2. Do you have more than 100 lines?
3. Do you have a mixture of devices, like smartphones, tablets, aircards, etc.?
4. Do you have excess devices on hand for redeployment (cold inventory, seed stock)?
5. Do you have – or need – policies detailing who is eligible for which type of equipment?
6. Are employees expected to use their devices for critical job responsibilities?
7. Do you need reporting to allocate your bill to different departments or general ledger buckets?
8. Do you have trouble navigating carrier portals and understanding their constant changes?
9. Are your employees spread out across multiple locations?
10. Do you have project-based or seasonal workers?
11. Does your IT team not have the time, experience nor capability to manage your lines, provider agreements, plans and devices effectively?
12. Do you want to keep your costs as low as possible?
13. Do you want to do everything possible to ensure the security of your data and your employees’ personal information?

If you answered “yes” to ANY of these questions, partnering with an MMS provider can make your mobility management efforts simpler and more cost-effective.

Five MMS Benefits for Companies of All Sizes

You don’t need a huge, unwieldy wireless environment to benefit from an MMS provider partnership. Here are five key facets of your business that outsourced mobility management can enhance:

#1: Procurement

Whether you use company-owned devices, employee-owned devices or a mix of both, asset management is a large part of mobility management. An MMS partner can manage all device lifecycle phases – from procurement to retirement – along with device inventory and cold storage.

Additionally, carrier and device choices can be overwhelming. An MMS provider partner can eliminate administrative headaches by streamlining device shopping and inventory turnover. And the right MMS provider can provide forward and reverse logistics services to ensure employees receive the right devices on time and move inventory through the system when repairs or replacements are needed.

#2: Support

With professional support in place, your mobility environment boosts – instead of drains – productivity. Accessing the MMS tools and expertise significantly enhances mobile device and service effectiveness.

Further, shifting the burden of end-user support to an MMS provider can free up stretched in-house IT teams to focus on high-value projects. Advanced MMS providers augment service teams with AI-powered workflow automation that facilitates rapid carrier interactions and substantially reduces resolution time.

#3: Security

Partnering with the right MMS provider ensures device and data security, serving as a central clearinghouse for device cleaning, wiping and data destruction that protects user and company information.

MMS providers can help you develop security policies that protect your company’s information and enforce them with behavior management reporting that tracks individual adherence to corporate usage guidelines. Automatic alerts flag potential data integrity, confidentiality, financial, regulatory or safety issues.

#4: Management

Remote work is dramatically expanding corporate footprints, sometimes reaching across international borders. This geographic disbursement of mobile devices and lines requires tedious management of complicated geographic and service provider boundaries.

A centralized portal provided by your MMS provider can streamline that management, empowering administrators to access usage on-demand and keep tabs on all devices under management. The platform also facilitates centralized moves, adds, changes and deletes (MACDs) (moves, adds changes and deletes), simplifies and automates reporting and makes it easy to allocate mobility costs for accounting and forecasting. And the best part? Most use cases can be customized and automated to your specific needs.

An essential feature of your MMS provider’s portal should be a comprehensive view of your mobility environment through a “single pane of glass” that eliminates bouncing between carrier portals and hunting for savings through clunky interfaces and siloed data.

#5: Costs

100 percent of organizations overspend on their mobility – in time and money. That’s because they lack the expertise and tools to:

• Optimize mobility costs through
  • contract negotiation
  • usage monitoring
  • bill auditing
  • fraud detection
  • device repurposing, reselling and recycling
  • upgrading policies that define device lifespans and protect budgets from serial upgraders
• Perform effective bill auditing and fraud detection
• Streamline inventory management
• Tame invoice and contract management
• Develop, audit and enforce mobility policies

The Bottom Line

Outsourced mobility management isn’t just for large enterprises with sprawling footprints. Medium-sized businesses can have limited resources to deploy on mobility management, exposing them to resource drain, excess costs and security risks. Working with the right MMS partner can close those gaps, save money and improve user experience.

Need a partner to help manage your mobility? Connect with a vMOX expert today.