Every year, before Chinese New Year, I make a special effort to do a deep clean of my kitchen. It’s important to get the New Year off to a good start and keep the Kitchen God happy. While I don’t know all the details, I do think it’s a good policy and I need external motivation to do an annual kitchen “Detailing”.

What is funny about this is not my desire to keep the Kitchen God happy, but that I have to clean my kitchen at all, since I really don’t cook and rarely do anything other than boil water. Yet, year after year, I will find seemingly random items tucked into the bottom of the fridge or the side of the pantry. I always think “it’s all good” – and I always find something that’s amiss. It never fails. I need to force myself to look and see – find the problem (something mysterious in the freezer) – and handle it.

I was thinking about this in our team meeting this morning as I was listening to one of the guys talk about a site visit he was on last week. He said he was listening to this customer basically say, “Oh, yes – everything is under control. We know who has what mobile devices, our inventory list is accurate, etc., etc.” Then, they loaded the data into MobilityCentral – and whadya know – there were hundreds(!!) of devices on the carrier bill that didn’t tie to his inventory list. They are paying month after month for devices that they don’t necessarily know who they belong to! One of those eye opening, ah ha moments.

So now he can work on cleaning up this stuff. Let’s just look at the simple (and conservative) math:200 devices x monthly average plan $60 x 12 months = $ 144,000 annualized spend on mysterious devices Here is this guy thinking (and saying) “it’s all good” and that he has tight control over his inventory, but when he actually checks it out – he’s paying for mobile devices that are not on his “list”- and no one wants to do that.

You don’t know unless you look in the dark corners, even if you “think” it’s clean, you never know what’s hidden behind the ice tray.

Related Posts - ordered by relevance

1. Don’t let your wireless spend become a money pit October 15th, 2009  
2. Proudly driving collaboration amongst peers on MOM’s Kitchen – a Mobility Manager’s Community February 1st, 2010  
3. Recycling your Phone February 4th, 2009  

Tags: Manage Mobile Inventory

This entry was posted by Maggie Mosteller on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 9:17 pm and is filed under Visage Mobile blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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