The FCC issued a public notice July 29th announcing that the Wireline Competition Bureau has compiled a preliminary list of rate-of-return study areas that now face funding cuts. These ILEC study areas, determined to have 99-100% overlap with one or more unsubsidized competitor, are at risk of having their FCC support frozen and gradually reduced over time.
Following a 2011 initiative to eliminate high-cost universal service support in incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC) study areas, the Commission set about defining methodology which was achieved in 2014. Now, many providers will be losing support and it’s becoming more vital to employ lean cost-cutting methods and maximize competitive value.
One way to do this is to reduce the amount of redundant processes within your company. Cut the hours spent repeating data entry by integrating information from multiple systems into one, single source. Each department shouldn’t need to enter the same data into their own separate systems when it could all be reached from one place, combined with relevant information from each of the other departments.
By using a single source of information, companies can cut back on wasted time by eliminating the need for inter-departmental calls and emails. Calls from field technicians to the central office aren’t necessary when techs can find all relevant information on their mobile equipment. Marketing and sales teams can upsell customers without relying on engineers to tell them what maximum service they can offer in particular areas. The application of single-source data referencing can positively impact each division of your organization.
A Visual Operating Systems (VOS) like M4 Solutions also saves valuable personnel resources by automating processes. A VOS tracks and creates circuits with auto assignment, while also generating staking sheets and work orders for installation. Network management and element management systems can auto provision equipment to start services and monitor for customer experience. The VOS also knows where repair technicians are in the field and auto assigns trouble tickets to open techs.
M4 Solutions was built, simply put, to decrease expenses and increase revenue. With the threat of losing FCC support approaching, companies need to make critical decisions regarding efficiency, costs and resources. M4 Solutions can help by removing manual processes, information barriers, and redundant workflows. Wondering how else you can reduce inefficiencies? Contact us to start a discussion about how M4 can help you.