Tips for cutting telecom costs.

• Position: Cost-cutting - Brief Article

The telecommunications spend area is so wrought with inefficiency that most enterprises don't know how much they spend on telecom services, never mind how they can manage those budgets." So says the Aberdeen Group, which maintains that large corporations can potentially save tens of millions of dollars a year--or as much as 10 percent of network costs--by taking proactive steps to implement controls.

Glen S. Kazerman, executive vice president and co-founder of Broadmargin, a Virginia-based telecom outsourcing and application service provider, believes that many CFOs and other finance executives are missing the opportunity to reduce these expenses, which can often be an enterprise's third- or fourth-largest cost.

He offers a list of common telecom billing and cost-control errors:

* Outright billing mistakes, such as when new contracts are not reflected in the bill, inappropriate state or federal taxes are assessed, credits are not applied, discontinued circuits continue to be billed, etc.

* Failure by the telecommunications company to correct the identified mis takes in a timely manner.

* Failure to track telecommunications...