Company growth is a good thing. However, growth often requires even more work to consolidate its gains. For operationally intensive retail companies, this often looks like an increasing footprint of stores, warehouses, and delivery fleets.
This new infrastructure brings with it a need for rapid digital transformation. Every branch, warehouse, and delivery vehicle needs extra networking.
However, what often happens is that front-end innovation accelerates, but back-end telecom infrastructure doesn’t keep pace.
Amid this progress, it’s not uncommon for telecom infrastructure to remain fragmented, outdated, and unclear.
This is because IT teams often find themselves in perpetual crisis mode, sourcing connectivity solutions store by store, vendor by vendor, and contract by contract.
This kind of disaggregated approach can be rationalised in the name of growth, but it always burdens the balance sheet down the line. In cases like these, getting on top of IT spend early can be a strategic enabler.
The hidden drain of SIM sprawl and vendor bloat
If you’ve been in any large retailer’s IT operations centre, you’ll likely find a dashboard for POS uptime, delivery tracking, or even real-time sales. What you won’t find is a clean, unified view of telecom assets across hundreds of sites.
What’s more typical is a sprawl of mobile contracts, unutilised or underutilised SIM cards, business broadband lines, and legacy WAN circuits that don’t get decommissioned. Orphaned lines stay live because no one wants to disrupt operations, while over-provisioned services stay over-provisioned because the site budget absorbed the cost.
It might be surprising how such an unmanaged ecosystem can quietly drain resources without triggering alarms.
But with each new vendor, contract, or service rollout, pricing can be wildly different, SLAs are hastily signed off, and there is no single source of accountability. Most industry data suggests that 10–20% of enterprise telecom spend is waste.
The more distributed the footprint, the bigger the hole gets. In the retail business, where margin pressure is relentless, this is a major governance failure. And it’s exactly where smart cost control must come in.
Why telecom complexity blocks transformation
Imagine what company leaders could do if there were a way to recoup all this wasted money. It’s the promise of being able to recover this money that puts retail IT leaders under pressure to drive digital transformation at speed.
Because if transformation does not happen, the situation becomes more than simply a cost drain, but also slows everything down. Procurement teams, lacking real-time data, find themselves trapped in renewal cycles with no visibility into performance or alternatives. Product teams, often strapped for budget funding, struggle to innovate.
In a market where competitive advantage is measured in operational speed and customer responsiveness, the lack of telecom transformation becomes a liability.
Fragmented contracts, forgotten assets, and thousands of inactive SIMs quietly burn through budgets, but with improved technology expense management tools, it doesn’t have to be this way.
Why unified visibility matters now more than ever
In distributed retail, without a clear, vendor-neutral view of telecom services, usage, and contracts, IT and procurement leaders can’t be effective.
They’re making high-value decisions based on outdated spreadsheets, siloed data, or vendor-provided reports that do not paint the full picture.
And in a landscape where contracts overlap, usage fluctuates, and pricing varies by site, this lack of visibility directly undermines cost control.
That’s why a good telecom expense management tool eliminates guesswork by providing centralised control over site-level connectivity and mobility.
This is where OneView changes the game. It provides a unified dashboard that consolidates every line, service, and contract, regardless of vendor, into a single source of truth.
Users get instant insight into what’s being used, where the waste is, and which contracts are underperforming.
Intelligent control with OneView: enforce policy, recover value
With real-time reporting and anomaly detection built in, OneView flags suspicious usage patterns, identifies billing errors, and helps enforce SLAs without manual effort.
It means procurement teams can negotiate from a position of strength. IT teams can act proactively instead of reactively, and the business gets the agility it needs to scale, adapt, and innovate, without telecom complexity holding it back.
The benefits don’t stop at tracking. OneView makes intelligent recommendations for service consolidation and cost recovery, helping teams identify opportunities to retire redundant lines or re-bundle services at better rates.
Anomaly detection is built in, with unused SIMs, duplicate billing, or unusual usage spikes all reported in real-time. This is operational gold, allowing IT teams to resolve issues before they escalate and providing procurement with the data they need to negotiate more than simply renew.
Quick wins across the network
If you are a retail CIO or procurement leader looking for quick wins, OneView delivers a measurable impact from day one. Inactive lines, often overlooked across vast networks, can be identified and cancelled within weeks, freeing up budget with no disruption to operations.
SLA breaches, which often slip through the cracks, now trigger automated credit recovery workflows, allowing businesses to recover funds without the need for manual intervention or prolonged disputes.
Perhaps most crucially, OneView empowers smart bundling across vendors. By analysing usage patterns and contract terms in real time, the platform pinpoints opportunities to consolidate services and negotiate lower per-unit rates.
The bottom line: telecom control as strategic agility
Many organisations still treat telecom spend as a troublesome but necessary service to reconcile rather than a core strategic lever. The truth is, without control over your telecom environment, every expansion, upgrade, or digital initiative runs slower and costs more than it should.
Taking control means more than just reducing spend, it results in operations becoming more agile. What does this look like? It looks like freeing IT teams from reactive troubleshooting and providing procurement with the data to drive smarter negotiations.
Every enterprise infrastructure is unique, and assumptions create blind spots. Over two decades, we’ve seen the same pattern: most teams don’t realise there’s a problem until cost anomalies compound and telecom complexity starts to undermine digital transformation.
That’s why we offer a free Telecom Cost Audit – to give you clear, objective insight into your environment. Because without structured diagnosis, most attempts at control remain reactive.
