A telecom expense management rescue case study: how BAZ Group fixed mismanaged GL coding, rebuilt a service inventory from scratch, and restored reliable business intelligence — enabling $5.7M in annual telecom savings that were invisible until the data was clean.
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Quick Answer A leading travel services enterprise came to BAZ Group after realizing their TEM software was producing unreliable reporting and their telecom costs were clearly higher than they should be. The root cause: over 50% of costs were being allocated to incorrect GL codes, making it impossible to track expenditures or identify savings opportunities. BAZ dedicated 2,200+ man-hours in the first 90 days to correct the GL coding system, rebuild the service inventory from scratch, and establish reliable monthly reporting. The data clarity unlocked $5.7M in annual telecom savings that had been invisible until the foundation was fixed. |
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$5.7M Annual telecom savings unlocked |
50%+ Of costs in wrong GL codes on arrival |
2,200+ Man-hours in first 90 days |
30 Days To onboarding and bill processing |
There is a widespread assumption in enterprise telecom management that deploying a TEM (telecom expense management) software platform solves the problem of telecom cost visibility. It doesn’t. Software is only as good as the data that goes into it — and the data quality, categorization, and ongoing management discipline that determine whether a TEM platform delivers its promised value are not things the software provides on its own.
Most TEM software vendors will implement their platform, train users on the interface, and hand the organization a system they expect will manage itself. What they typically don’t provide is the specialized, dedicated team effort required to ensure that every invoice is properly categorized, every service is accurately inventoried, and the underlying data structure supports the kind of business intelligence the organization actually needs. When that work doesn’t happen, the result is exactly what this client experienced: costs accumulating in the wrong places, reporting that can’t be trusted, and savings opportunities that are invisible because the data is too corrupted to reveal them.
A leading travel services enterprise came to BAZ Group after recognizing the symptoms of a data management failure: they knew they were wasting money on telecom, but their TEM system couldn’t tell them where. The reporting was unreliable. The cost allocation didn’t match operational reality. And the strategic decisions that should have been informed by clean telecom data were being made in the dark.
The diagnosis, once BAZ began the engagement, was clear: over 50% of the client’s telecom costs were being allocated to incorrect GL (general ledger) codes. In a large enterprise, GL coding is the system by which every expense is assigned to the correct cost center, department, or business function. When that system is wrong, every downstream report built on it is also wrong — and any optimization effort that depends on understanding where money is going becomes impossible.
The client had a TEM platform. They had invoices being processed. What they didn’t have was a foundation: accurate GL coding, a reliable service inventory, and the management discipline to ensure the data stayed clean. Without that foundation, the software was producing the appearance of oversight without the substance of it.
Over 50% of the client’s telecom costs were in the wrong GL codes. You can’t optimize what you can’t see — and you can’t see what’s miscategorized.
BAZ Group’s engagement began with a 30-day onboarding to get the client’s bills into active processing — establishing a working baseline before the deeper remediation work began. Over the next 90 days, BAZ dedicated 2,200+ man-hours to a six-step process designed to fix the foundation and build the infrastructure for reliable ongoing management.
BAZ began with a thorough assessment of the client’s existing GL coding structure — examining how telecom expenses were currently being categorized and whether that categorization made sense for the client’s actual business environment. The assessment confirmed what the symptoms had suggested: the coding system was significantly broken, with more than half of all costs misallocated in ways that made expense traceability effectively impossible.
With a clear picture of what was wrong, BAZ revised the coding system to correct the errors and improve the traceability of expenses across the organization. This wasn’t a superficial relabeling exercise — it was a structural redesign of how telecom costs were categorized relative to the business functions they supported. The corrected coding system immediately enabled the kind of cost tracking that the TEM platform had been theoretically designed to provide but had never actually delivered.
Fixing the existing errors was necessary but not sufficient. The processes that had allowed the errors to accumulate also needed to change. BAZ identified the specific process failures that had produced the misallocation — where in the invoice handling workflow costs were being assigned incorrectly, and why — and redesigned those processes to prevent the same errors from recurring. This process redesign is what transforms a one-time data correction into a durable improvement.
There was no reliable service inventory when BAZ began the engagement — no accurate record of what telecom services the client was paying for, by location and business function. BAZ built one from scratch. A complete, accurate service inventory is the foundation of effective telecom expense management: without it, you can’t identify orphaned services, you can’t validate that billing reflects actual usage, and you can’t plan intelligently for future needs. The inventory BAZ built gave the client this foundation for the first time.
With clean data and a corrected coding system, BAZ built a monthly reporting structure that gave the client ongoing visibility into the invoice and billing process. This reporting was designed to be operationally useful — not just a summary of what was spent, but a tool for identifying anomalies, tracking costs against expectations, and surfacing optimization opportunities in real time. It replaced the unreliable reporting the client had been working with and gave finance and IT leadership the business intelligence they had been trying to access for years.
The final step was transitioning the engagement from remediation to ongoing management: BAZ took over the invoice processing function to maintain the corrected system and continue identifying additional optimization opportunities as they emerged. The ongoing management relationship ensures that the data quality achieved in the first 90 days doesn’t degrade over time — and that the savings unlocked by clean data continue to compound rather than erode.
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Outcome |
Detail |
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Annual savings |
$5.7M in telecom savings generated once data clarity enabled optimization |
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GL coding accuracy |
Over 50% of costs were misallocated on arrival — fully corrected and restructured |
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Onboarding speed |
Client onboarded and bills in active processing within 30 days |
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Initial investment |
2,200+ man-hours dedicated in the first 90 days to remediation and foundation building |
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Service inventory |
Complete, accurate inventory built from scratch by location and business function |
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Reporting |
Monthly reporting structure delivering reliable, real-time business intelligence |
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Ongoing management |
BAZ continues managing invoice processing to maintain data quality and identify new optimization opportunities |
The lesson of this engagement is one that applies broadly across enterprise telecom management: software platforms don’t manage themselves. TEM software is a tool. Its value depends entirely on the quality of the data and processes behind it — and building and maintaining that quality requires specialized, dedicated human expertise that most organizations don’t have internally and most TEM vendors don’t provide.
BAZ Group’s invoice processing and monitoring service fills that gap. The 2,200+ man-hours invested in the first 90 days of this engagement were not about using the software. They were about fixing the foundation the software depends on: the GL coding structure, the service inventory, the invoice categorization processes, and the reporting architecture. That foundation work is what unlocked $5.7M in annual savings — savings that had existed in the environment all along, but were invisible because the data couldn’t reveal them.
The ongoing management relationship that followed the remediation ensures the foundation stays solid. Clean data degrades without active maintenance. BAZ’s continued involvement in invoice processing and monitoring means the client’s TEM system continues to deliver the business intelligence and savings opportunities it was originally purchased to provide.
What drove the $5.7M outcome:
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Is Your TEM Software Actually Delivering? If your telecom reporting feels unreliable or your costs don’t match your expectations, the problem is probably the data — not the software. BAZ Group will assess your current GL coding and invoice management processes and show you what’s actually possible. |
TEM (telecom expense management) software delivers on its promise only when the underlying data is accurate, properly categorized, and actively maintained. The most common reason TEM software underperforms is that the data management work required to make it function correctly — accurate GL coding, service inventory management, invoice categorization, and ongoing quality control — was never properly executed. In this engagement, over 50% of the client’s telecom costs were in incorrect GL codes, which meant the platform’s reporting was fundamentally unreliable. Fixing the data foundation unlocked $5.7M in annual savings that the software had been unable to identify.
GL coding (general ledger coding) in telecom expense management is the process of assigning every telecom expense to the correct cost center, department, or business function in the organization’s accounting system. Accurate GL coding is the foundation of telecom cost visibility: it determines whether finance and IT leadership can see where money is actually being spent, identify anomalies, and make informed strategic decisions. When GL coding is incorrect — as it was for over 50% of this client’s costs — every downstream report and optimization analysis built on that data is also incorrect.
Fixing a mismanaged TEM system requires addressing both the existing errors and the processes that created them. BAZ Group’s approach follows six steps: assessing the current GL coding structure to understand the scope of misallocation; revising the coding system to correct errors and improve traceability; redesigning the processes that produced the errors to prevent recurrence; building an accurate service inventory from scratch by location and business function; establishing a monthly reporting structure that delivers reliable business intelligence; and transitioning to ongoing invoice processing management to maintain the corrected foundation. The first 90 days of this engagement required 2,200+ man-hours to execute all six steps across a large enterprise telecom environment.
For this engagement, BAZ onboarded the client and began processing bills within 30 days, and completed the core foundation remediation — GL coding correction, service inventory, process redesign, and reporting structure — within 90 days. The $5.7M in annual savings emerged from the optimization opportunities that became visible once the data was clean. The timeline for any specific engagement depends on the size of the environment and the depth of the data management issues, but organizations with significant GL coding errors typically see the first optimization opportunities within 60–90 days of beginning remediation.
TEM software is a technology platform that provides tools for tracking, categorizing, and reporting on telecom expenses. Managed telecom expense services provide the specialized human team that makes the software actually work: assessing and correcting the data structure, maintaining accuracy over time, identifying optimization opportunities that automated tools miss, and ensuring that the reporting the software produces reflects operational reality. Most enterprises that deploy TEM software without dedicated managed services find that the platform delivers a fraction of its promised value — because the software is only as good as the data and processes behind it, and those require active human management.
Invoice processing and monitoring generates telecom savings through three mechanisms: catching billing errors before they’re paid (incorrect rates, unauthorized charges, services billed but not contracted), identifying services that are being billed but are no longer in use, and providing the data clarity needed to make strategic optimization decisions — renegotiating contracts, right-sizing plans, and consolidating vendors. In this engagement, the $5.7M in annual savings came primarily from the third mechanism: once the data was clean enough to reveal the full picture of what the client was spending and why, the optimization opportunities that had been invisible became actionable.