One of the more shocking bits of data I have collected in my tenure at the manufacturing firm I work for is the results of telecommunication auditing. It was a new idea, something that we had not done before, and frankly I did not expect a whole lot of startling information to be gotten from such an audit. I was quite surprised by the level of inefficiencies present in what I thought was a very basic, fool proof system.

The way our company is set up is, that any person with a job that will require them to communicate on behalf of the company while mobile is given a cell phone. That cell phone is given a shared plan that is paid for by the company. That seemed basic to me, but apparently the telecommunication auditing process revealed chances for us to improve our system. The cell carrier that we exclusively use, for example, provides free, unlimited calling to other cellular devices. When our employees are at their desks, it is of normal order for them to use their desk phones to make all phone calls. The telecommunication auditing process indicates that there are thousands of dollars a year spent on minutes from our PBX system calling outside to cell phones.

Using the telecommunication auditing data, we have determined that even at their desks, employees should utilize their cell phones making calls to other cell phones. This product of the telecommunication auditing will yield thousands in cost reduction by taking advantage of the fact that there will be no cost incurred by using the unlimited mobile to mobile air time allowed by our cell provider. There were several other items noted during telecommunication auditing that are also worth looking into, and overall I feel that we will be able to reduce our third largest annual cost by a significant amount in refining our current phone use.