We at Penland Corner Consultants have been always amused at the trendiness related to the concept of “going green”. Clearly the popularity of this term and the subsequent push to get everyone on this page has gained momentum beyond the few original tree huggers in their sandal shoes; professing  doom and gloom if we do not go green. Given the traction of this, it seems this term, as we see it, has become a mantra used rather loosely to address  a variety of agendas in the business world hidden under the umbrella that the business is making our world a better place. Now anyone will attempt to attach a green tag on their product or service to associate with this popular trend, even if there is an obvious tie or not. Marketing 101:  brand as you see necessary to increase the bottom line and pay little attention to little else.

I am not advocating that going green is not good for the environment. I am just amused at the notion of so many jumping on the band wagon to promote products when the company really does nothing adhere to green initiatives in any other way than their green branding is meant to build sales. Jump on the political correctness train, what it can hurt if it increases your customer base.

Well, we do believe in green initiatives. You can certainly reference our landing page (www.penlandcorner.com) to see our strong statements on practicing green initiatives. Given the above, some explanation is in order.  You see, we do believe we should concentrate on making the world a better place for generations following us.  We do believe in clean air, modest consumption, and recycling. But at the end of the day, we believe that going green means reducing costs. Its that simple. Our clients engage us for a variety of reasons, and green initiatives are included.  What this ends up resulting in is that the green initiatives means designing IT centers and telecommunication strategies to significantly use less energy; optimize solutions so less maintenance and resources need to be applied. If you wish to categorize this as green under the political correct definitions, fine. But we categorize this as pure cost savings that can be applied straight to the bottom line or to facilitate growth and subsequently more jobs for our economy.

Call it “green”, OK. We call it great business sense, and that’s why we at PCC practice green consulting. It is good for our clients bottom line in cost savings and for the environment.

Given the ongoing state of the economy it is not surprising that we have received a number of inquiries from our clients on how to save money on their communications expenditures.  While there are a number of ways we can help our clients, the one we recommend as a starting place surprises many — the bill audit.

For those who are unfamiliar with this service, a bill audit is fairly straightforward.  The audit is a comparison of the service provider invoices received by the client against the service providers internal records.  If errors are found we work with the service provider to correct the error going forward and request refunds on past over-billings. 

While this may seem straightforward in theory it is extremely complicated in practice.  The service provider’s customer records are written in an arcane codes called USOC codes.  The reasoning behind the USOC is best left to another time. Suffice it to say that everything in the network has a USOC code.  The combination of elements into features and features into saleable products that appear on an invoice is what make it complicated. 

There are a couple of reasons why we recommend the audit as a starting place in a cost savings program.

1. According to a Gartner Group study of a few years back upwards of 80% of all bills contain errors.  There are a number of reasons for this ranging deregulation of phone service to the myriad of incompatible billing systems brought on by the wave of mergers of the past few years.
2. The bill audit has no direct cost to the client.  Penland Corner offers  bill auditing on a contingency basis.  Our fees come out of the refunds and savings we find as a result of the audit.  No refund, no fee.
3. It is a logical starting place for a cost savings program.  It simply makes sense to get an accurate assessment of  current services and their costs before we start making changes.

We recommend that all of our clients get a telecom audit to establish a baseline and anytime major changes are made to their service.  It is the best way to stay on top of communications costs.