If your circuit inventory lives in one spreadsheet owned by one engineering director, it is not really an inventory. It is a personal reference document that the rest of the company is quietly depending on. That distinction becomes very expensive the moment that director changes roles, gets pulled onto another project, or leaves.
We see this constantly. Someone in engineering, usually a smart and diligent person, has built the closest thing the company has to a source of truth for circuits. They know which sites have which carriers. They know which circuits are primary and which are backup. They know that the T1 at the distribution center is technically decommissioned but still billing. All of that lives in their head, and a version of it lives in a spreadsheet they update when they have time.
And then the spreadsheet becomes the enterprise’s system of record. By accident.
What's the Risk of Not Having a Single Source of Truth for Telecom Assets?
Here is what a spreadsheet inventory cannot do:
- Tie circuits to accounts, contracts, and invoices, so you can validate that what you are paying matches what you agreed to pay.
- Include site-level services that live outside the corporate view. Guard desk internet, temporary construction connectivity, executive residence service. These do not show up in engineering’s world, but they show up on invoices every month.
- Track ownership when someone changes roles. A cost center rolls up cleanly. A person’s name does not.
- Flag orphaned circuits. A spreadsheet does not know that a service has been running with zero usage for 14 months.
- Show you what you actually have. It shows you what one person knew about, on the day they last touched the file.
Every enterprise we have ever worked with has thought their inventory was more accurate than it turned out to be. That is not a criticism. It is just the nature of one-person spreadsheets in a business that has grown, acquired other businesses, opened sites, closed sites, and switched carriers a few times.
A Real Scenario
A regional facility signs a two-year contract for a backup circuit that costs $850 a month. The engineer who ordered it moves to another team. The circuit stays on the invoice. Nobody at the site uses it. Nobody in finance questions it because it has always been there. Two years later, contract auto-renews. Now you are looking at four more years of paying for a service that no one has touched.
Multiply that scenario by a few dozen sites and a few dozen carriers. That is the hidden cost of a single-spreadsheet inventory. And it compounds.
A Real Scenario
A real telecom inventory is a live system that ties every circuit to:
- The account and vendor it comes from
- The contract that governs its rate and term
- The site or business unit that owns it
- The invoice line item that bills for it every month
- The usage or performance data that shows whether it is actually being used
When those five things are connected, the inventory becomes self-correcting. New circuit shows up on an invoice? The system flags it and asks who ordered it. A circuit disappears from an invoice? The system flags it and asks whether it was supposed to be decommissioned. A circuit runs at zero usage for three months? The system flags it as an optimization candidate.
That is what “clean inventory data” actually means. Understand what you have, where it is, and how much it costs. Everywhere.
Where to Start
You do not need to boil the ocean. Start with your top three carriers by spend. Pull the last three invoices. Extract every circuit and cross-reference against the spreadsheet. The gap between what is billing and what is documented is usually the first “oh no” moment. It is also the first opportunity.
If you would like AMI to run this exercise for you, our free service provider inventory report does exactly that. We will show you what the invoices say you have, versus what your spreadsheet thinks you have.
David Sonenstein - Vice President of Product Strategy
AMI Strategies
With over 20 years in the industry, David helps orchestrate AMI’s vision for vendor hyperautomation. While contributing to AMI’s adoption of automation technologies, system integrations and technology frameworks, his research focuses on enterprise market and technology trends and where automation solutions can help organizations achieve their desired business outcomes. He currently serves on the executive board of the Enterprise Technology Management Association (ETMA) and is an associate of the Technology Business Management (TBM) Council.
