On average IT departments spend at no less than US$96 a month on data fees for each worker that uses their own mobile device in the workplace, according to a 2013 survey on bring-your-own-device (BYOD) adoption in the enterprise.
Depending on how big your staff is, that can add up to quite a sum. Which means as more organizations require staff to use their own mobile devices for work in exchange for full or part compensation controlling costs is going to be increasingly important to telecom managers.
Advice for handling so-called BYOD reimbursements is offered in a piece this week on Computerworld.com.
For example, manually managing BYOD expense reports submitted by employees can cost a company $15 to $20 dollars in labour per expense report, according to Hyoun Park, principal consultant at DataHive Consulting.
BYOD reimbursements go through several departments such as accounts payable, accounting and IT and so managing it eats up a lot of labour hours.
To cut down on labour costs like this, the State of Delaware encourages employees who are eligible for its $40 a month BYOD reimbursement plan to submit their bill no more often than on a quarterly basis. This reduces the cost the state incurs from processing reports.
Brunswick Corp., an Illinois-based manufacturing firm, decided to streamline its BYOD reimbursement process in order to cut cost by cutting out IT from the decision process. Employees who apply to get the BYOD reimbursement get the OK from their managers. IT doesn’t handle the decision because it has no time and resource to do so.
The company processes the payments by checking data on an internal system the workers use to apply for reimbursement. The data is run against a human resources report to determine if the employee is still active with the company. There is no need for the employee to file any paperwork.
Another option is to outsource the BYOD reimbursement management.