With a various geo-political factors driving costs up globally, everything from fuel prices to shipping costs as well as shortages of key raw materials exacerbated by the shipping and logistics challenges are putting significant inflationary pressure on prices.
With costs going up, IT team leaders have due cause for concern that planned budget won’t cover the work it was supposed to fund. This is driving many to adjust plans and take a new look at where consolidation or standardisation can create efficiencies.
Pursuing ongoing digital innovation
In this environment, there is now an urgent need to find ways to use technology to counter rising inflation. And it’s not just about cutting costs. It’s about being able to use technology wisely to deliver efficiency gains and boost productivity.
In the communications technology landscape, there are five key areas where a recalibration of your tech setup can help mitigate inflationary pressures and bring significant long-term value to the business.
1. Unified Communications (UC)
With your employees working from many places besides the office, it’s critical to optimise the potential for collaboration and enhanced productivity with easy-to-use communication and sharing tools. To effectively communicate with customers and co-workers at any time, unified communication systems that integrate voice, video, and data channels deliver strong business value. UC supports the rising adoption of mobile VoIP systems enabled by SIP and app-based virtual numbers, as well as caller ID, voice mail, call recording, and call forwarding.
With UC systems also providing strong security to protect against data breaches, one integrated UC system allows you to enforce confidentiality of the data being shared when your people are working from multiple locations. You also get to minimise the complexity and maintenance requirements of your communications infrastructure.
2. Calling in Microsoft Teams
As an all-in-one communications platform, the switch to online collaboration using Microsoft Teams during the pandemic allowed employees to take advantage of digital alternatives to physical face-to-face meetings. Fast forward two years and in the face of rising inflation, it makes sense to extract even more value by using Teams in place of the traditional and expensive phone system. Calling in Teams allows your people to use their preferred device to dial a phone number and have a conversation using Microsoft Teams without the person on the other end having to use tool. When configured in the right way, Teams enables a company to connect with customers and co-workers alike, giving staff flexibility to smoothly switch between multiple types of devices.
3. SD-WAN/Networking
Given ongoing uncertainty, the business value of cloud technologies to scale up and down continues to resonate with many companies. As your business ramps up its adoption of cloud services, it’s critical your WAN can deliver performance. Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) offers a strong alternative to traditional network topography. Improving network security and agility, you can expect lower costs and bandwidth efficiency while supporting fast and reliable business applications in the cloud.
4. Enterprise Mobility Management
Inflationary pressure has the potential to impact your enterprise mobility landscape in significant ways, so it’s important to do more with less. With so many different mobile devices to manage, EMM helps streamline operations management, saving time and valuable IT resources from being swamped with routine admin tasks. With comprehensive self-service functionality, EMM empowers users to do many common tasks themselves which significantly reduces IT workloads. As the tasks associated with enterprise mobility management are complex and ongoing, outsourcing this work to an expert provider can deliver significant benefits.
5. Telecom Expense Management
When maximising cost efficiencies is more important than ever, TEM can play a big role in reducing revenue leakage and creating robust workflows for order provisioning and fulfilment, asset management, auditing, and payment processes. TEM helps reduce risks and increases accuracy in expense tracking and reporting, helping your business achieve financial goals through no-risk investments. And when it comes optimising rate plans to match usage patterns, TEM gives you clear usage information and data insights to maximise your buying power.
Supporting your business
In the face of rising inflation, imei can help you find ways to use technology to optimise your communications technology environment to deliver efficiency gains and boost productivity. For help with unified communications, enterprise mobility management, TEM or configuring an SD-WAN, please get in touch with the team at imei
