There are many businesses there who claim to save you huge amounts of money simply by analysing your bills and advising which lines can be cancelled based on lack of usage charges. This is fine in theory but without actually visiting your site how do they know what each line is used for? EFTPOS and HiCAPS machines for instance only dial a 1800 number and therefore generate no usage charges.
We know of a company who had their lines audited in this manner and it caused chaos across almost sites because EFTPOS, fax and security lines were disconnected. We were then called in to fix it all back up again.
One of our specialties is site audits. We have done them for a long time and we are very good at them. We are regularly employed by the major carriers to perform site audits for companies of all sizes – sometimes up to hundreds of sites across Australia. We also perform site audits for Queensland state government departments particularly in preparation for the arrival of NBN. In some cases another company has done an audit and we are engaged because they haven’t found all the services that are known to be on site. In many cases it did not appear a tech had been to site because the missing items were found without too much effort.
Site audits can be as simple as looking at phone lines coming into the building or can involve looking at the contents of racks and in large buildings checking on individual equipment at the end of the line.
Site audits can discover faulty lines that you are paying for but cannot actually use – particularly ISDN2 as they provide no indication that they are not working other than you may notice it is harder to get a line out during busy times or your customers complain they are always getting busy when they try to call you. A properly conducted site audit can save a considerable amount of money. We found one case where the head office of a major car company had 39 lines sitting unused since a cutover to digital lines several years prior – close to $2000 a month at today’s prices.
Two points to consider when deciding if you need a site audit:
- What is the purpose of the audit? Are you trying to save money, are you looking to move to another carrier that need to know which lines are associated with each other, etc. We can audit anything but the scope has to be agreed as to what data we are to collect and how you want it presented.
- In what timeframe are you going to act on the audit information? The audit is only accurate at the time it is done. If there is no change management process in place then on a large site somebody may require a new line to be connected the day after the audit is completed, rendering the audit inaccurate and you cannot very well put a change freeze in place for 6 months to preserve the accuracy of the audit while you work out how to proceed.
Contact us if you would like to arrange a site audit.
