Yesterday's post titled Top 7 Things I Learned About Managing Wirleess Services barely scratched the surface of the topic so here are 7 more insights into the experience:
1. Departments will pay for inactive, unused devices (cell phones, pagers, Blackberries, Treos, etc.) for months or years when the devices have been lost or thrown in drawers and forgotten. They don't keep track of them.
2. Let users choose among three or four phone models. It is best to distribute them in a "vendor fair" type atmosphere so users can handle the demo models and ask the vendor rep questions.
3. Generating cost savings reports for wireless services is a nightmare. The manner of billing is the same as for your home cell phone in that on one month's bill, service is billed in advance for the next month, usage in billed in arrears for the previous month, and neither of those time periods are the same when you actually get the bill. Confused, much?
4. Users who call foreign countries for hours on end when they are not at work and their jobs doesn't require it will eventually get noticed by Accounts Payable. Saying they "lost the phone" won't cut it either if that is not true since the carrier can pinpoint from where calls originated if necessary.
5. Purchasing, or whoever is managing the customer service aspect of the commodity on a day-to-day basis, should have many spare phones on hand. Users will not want to wait for the phones to be replaced when they are lost or damaged.
6. Upgrades are problematic. As soon as one person in a department gets the latest model, everyone else calls to ask when they get it too. (Yes, really.) Your vendor is not going to give you hundreds or thousands of free phones for all users every time a new model comes out.
7. Every company, whether it is ATT/Cingular (Google Finance Cingular), Sprint/Nextel (S), Verizon (VZ), T-Mobile (Google Finance T-Mobile), or any other, has its fans among the user base and on the selection team. Choosing one as the ultimate RFP winner as you would do in most commodities is probably a mistake. A primary one and a secondary one seem like more work, but are less trouble in the long run.
Have you managed wireless services in your Procurement career? Send your Top 7 List to PurchaseRealm@ComprehensiveAdvice.com and I will share it with my readers.
Comment Preview