Telecom Expense Management Provider Profile: ProfitLine. Check it out:
ProfitLine, a San Diego, CA-based provider of telecom expense management (TEM) services, recently won a contract with the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to manage that organization’s local telecom expenses for all locations and branches, on an outsourced basis.
To find out more about the significance of this contract in particular, and the company’s TEM services more broadly, TMCnet spoke with two ProfitLine executives: Rick Valencia, founder and chairman; and Stephen Hundley, president and CEO.About ProfitLineHundley described ProfitLine as a TEM sourcing and category manager, serving Fortune 1000 companies and big government. The company was founded in 1992 and at first offered only sourcing and contract negotiation services.ProfitLine’s bill management services were launched in the late 1990s, initially using a bootstrap platform. In 2002, after the dotcom bubble burst, ProfitLine received its first round of capital funding from Menlo Ventures. That funding was used to establish My Telco Manager, the Web platform used to power all aspects of ProfitLine’s TEM services.The company went through a second round of funding in 2005, and this time the monies were used to establish a TEM solution for mobile telephone services. Today, all of ProfitLine’s services have been integrated into a comprehensive offering covering wireless and wireline.“We're a BPO [business process outsourcing] company that provides an all-inclusive solution from source to pay across the complete telecom lifecycle,” Hundley said.He added: “Government has become a very big market for us.”Government agencies, Hundley noted, have large telecom bills, encompassing both wireline and wireless services.“All that stuff just begs to be managed,” he said.Complete Lifecycle ManagementIndustry surveys, Hundley noted, often point out that a significant amount of “leakage” occurs between the time a particular telecom service is sourced (ordered) and when it is paid for. Estimates of leakage generally are in the 25 percent range.“There's a big gap between what’s negotiated and what gets billed,” Valencia said. He added that ProfitLine acts a policeman for that gap so it can be shrunk down to zero.Because ProfitLine covers the entire TEM spectrum (sourcing to payment), Hundley said it is possible to truly validate what was sourced services against what is being paid for.The company has dubbed a term to describe this full-lifecycle management: telecom 360. In large part because of its broad spectrum of services, on average last year ProfitLine saved its customers 42 percent on telecom spending.“We see demand increasing for TEM services,” Hundley noted.He added that one of ProfitLine’s differentiators is the large database of business intelligence the company has built from all the transactions it has handled over the years. This intelligence can be used on the front or back end to help clients negotiate better prices for telecom services.The USPS ContractProfitLine’s recent contact with the USPS is noteworthy because of the client’s scale.“The contact is significant because the Postal Service is such a big agency with lots of locations and lots of spend,” Hundley noted.Valencia added that The USPS is the biggest client, in terms of number of locations, ever to sign up with a TEM provider.ProfitLine and TEM StandardsProfitLine has been involved for several years with Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions, an organization promoting technical and operations standards for the communications and information technologies industry, Valencia said.Specifically, ProfitLine is involved in helping to develop and promote electronic data interchange (EDI) standards—methods for computer-to-computer exchange of structured information. Valencia said that the company helped drive standards for wireline telecom data, and now is doing the same for wireless.“The goal is to get the bill into the hands of the enterprise in a format that we can audit and pay quickly,” he noted.Mae Kowalke previously wrote for Cleveland Magazine in Ohio and The Burlington Free Press in Vermont. To see more of her articles, please visit Mae Kowalke’s columnist page.
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