Managing telecom expenses – both wireline and wireless – is becoming an increasingly important priority for not only enterprises, but small- and medium-sized organizations as well. As more players enter the telecom expense management field, the task of finding the right provider can be daunting. For many companies, a fully integrated telecom lifecycle management is the answer.

With the challenges of the current economy, companies are forced to cut costs wherever they can, and they’re trying to locate where they can save money, according to Trent McCracken, president of Spectrum. Telecom is typically a top three or four expense, and “definitely on the radar screen” of IT decision makers.

“By implementing a telecom lifecycle management solution and renegotiating the contract terms and conditions with the carrier, you can very well start saving sometimes as soon as the very next month,” McCracken said. “The company then can forecast that monthly savings out the remainder of the year, which will ultimately have a positive impact on the bottom line.”

Cincinnati-based Spectrum helps its clients manage the entire telecommunications lifecycle, including carrier-independent consulting, network design, management and optimization, contract negotiation and customer support.

According to McCracken, companies of all sizes are trying to get a better grasp of telecom costs or to manage their telecom environment includes, which is inclusive of both enterprise customers and SMBs – or simply “anyone trying to get help understanding the complex world of telecom,” McCracken said.

TrueVue, the company’s fully integrated, turnkey solution that was built in house, is one of very few TEM/TLM solutions available today which has a unified platform for both wireless and wireline services.

“A lot of our competitors they’ve assembled their solution by buying a company or starting with a wireless solutions and then try to integrate some other wireline solution, and they’re constantly having an ongoing struggle with integration between those two platforms and that’s not an issue that we have,” McCracken said. In addition, our ability to handle the paper invoices efficiently using our patent-pending technology, it sets us apart pretty quickly.”

For example, TrueVue can look at a 2,000-page invoice and strip off data, and hone in on two or three pages within that invoice and send it to an individual employee or to a remote location.

“That’s a very popular service with our clients that have remote facilities where the remote facilities want to see what their costs are but then corporate doesn’t want to share what the total corporate invoice is,” McCracken said.

Spectrum officials said its bundled software and managed services TEM offering, as well as its technology for processing paper and electronic invoices, continues to be a “clear differentiator” among its competitors.