How Enterprise Mobility Data Can Stave Off Employee Fraud

A long long time ago, offices were full of land-lines and employees smoking at their desks. Managing phone-use was easy: you looked 5 desks to the left, and checked if Sam was on the phone with his wife for the 5th time.

Today things aren’t as clean-cut; offices are filled with laptops, smartphones, BYODs, tablets, smart watches, and more often now - the office is a mobile station, with meetings held at local Starbucks shops.

The visibility you once had is now relegated to the monthly wireless bill and data charges; and it got us thinking, is this so bad?

The resolute answer is: no!

 Cloud computing and a mobile-enabled workforce has helped foster a new type of employee, one that is nimble and engaged, and one that wants your business to grow and succeed just as much as they want the freedom to be mobile.

But what happens when the opposite is true, when fraudulent activities contribute to higher costs, and the employee is the one responsible? You can’t just glance over and see what your employee is up to, so what do you?

For most companies the reality is, tracking down fraudulent activity takes time and resources, both requirements in short order when you are running a lean organization with all hands on deck.

This is where data is your best friend, and why we are 100% behind deploying infrastructure that allows you to not only collect but also act-on data. We live and breath this philosophy here at Simplify Wireless.

How can you collect and act on wireless data?

With a wireless fleet management ecosystem, one that provides insight into your operations, and helps you:

1. Gain an understanding of long-term use trends and patterns, like:

• iPhones breaking or being lost, just around September (the month Apple launches new flagship phones),
• Data-overages, tied to SIM cards.
• Device lifespans and requirements, and benchmarks for average/best scenarios.

2. Gain control over your fleet and bill:

• Know who has access to what device, or who should/shouldn't.
• Create transparency by tracking device responsibility
  
• Bring all your devices under one device management umbrella, including accessories and add-ons.
  
• Review employee bills/charges.
  

3. Build automation and segmentation into your governance:

• Funnel requests to the people who need to see them, and at the appropriate time.
  
• Give end-users access to use-data statistics, so that they can better manage their own behaviour.
  
• Prevent "mistakes" from happening during procurement by automating and tracking every step: from request to fulfillment and finally hand-off and delivery.

With all the above benefits of a fleet management ecosystem, how do we prevent fraud? By giving visibility to the processes, actions and data points that by and large go unnoticed when only the carrier bill is focused on.

Here are some examples of actions that can be taken when patterns are made visible:

• Intervention during the all too popular iPhone release dates.
• Notices of good use behaviour and bad use behaviour.
  
• Audits and reviews implemented quickly and effortlessly.
• Device recalls implemented quickly.
• Device pools created for teams to share resources, with 1-click matching.
• Data driven procurement policy updates.
• KPI scorecards can drive management decisions.
• Updates to personal use policies/governance can be pushed-out quickly.
• Visibility on workflow overload and pipeline blockages.
• Plan updates and changes to service your team's evolving needs.
• A clear and transparent workflow with tracking and logs baked into the process, allowing you to not only audit your workforce but also your contractors.
• By centralizing data, logs, and actions: your wireless coordinators can quickly act to resolve issues/errors without having to spend time tracking down each system's data.

Ultimately, the use of digital devices to do work and be efficient is no longer a luxury, it is a requirement. However, the bottom line is: businesses need to routinely review all activity related to their device fleet to verify charges and prevent abuse and fraud. Since employees have limited time resources, why not simplify all the desk swivel processes and combine every system under one management umbrella.

We've seen many cases of employee fraud, some barely a blimp while others, through neglect in tracking and action, can climb in cost to thousands of dollars. As a final sign-off in this month's Datapoints series, we'll finish with a story about why data tracking is important, and and how it helped one company save thousands.

A wireless coordinator (WC) noticed an employees' data bill climbing high, hundreds of dollars were being spent in additional costs per month. The WC looked over the data charges for that particular month, and noticed that the highest use was during the weekends. The account was flagged for the employee, and the employee's manager got to the bottom of the additional charges. The employee would borrow an iPad for the weekends from work, for the drive north to the cottage for his son, and during the drive he would remove the SIM card from his work phone and put it in the iPad to stream movies.

Just by glancing at the assigned devices and data use, the WC had a good idea of what was happening, and not only notified the employee but created new governance policies to prevent these types of miss-uses. She was also able to add more data on the spot, to prevent the extra charges from bellowing.