Home work gets easier - TeleCommute Solutions - Company Business and Marketing

Communications News, Oct, 1999 by Ripley Hotch

The cost of do-it-yourself remote access is getting high, and the push of employees to telecommute is leading to very high hidden costs. Schilling talks about one company that thought it had 110 full-time telecommuters and 1,400 remote users. TCS studied the group and found closer to 400 full-time telecommuters. The employees did it by expensing equipment--telecommuters told the evaluation team that they would simply write an expense report for a big meal and buy the equipment they wanted. Furthermore, since the company didn't know the equipment was out there, when the employee left, he or she got to keep it. One employee had six computers and six phone lines, all paid for by the company.

"In our sampling, we found that this company was losing close to $150,000 a year in just capital sliding out the door," says Schilling. It gets tricky for TCS, which gets hired to put some structure in the telecommuting program. "The CEO knows he's got a problem, and we come back with really ugly news. It's difficult for him," says Schilling. "Here's an IT guy who says `I need to get control into this program, but I can't tell everybody this because this is really bad news, and I'll look bad. There are dollars it's hard for me to fess up to, and there are dollars that I can't get to that are in expense reports.' We get into these really sticky situations. We're finding just fascinating stuff."

On top of these are the management and legal issues. Telecommuters need to be trained, and evaluations need to be made of the employee's home office to make sure it meets OSHA requirements. Equipment needs to be set up, tracked, and supported.

Faced with all these costs and sticky areas, the TCS solution begins to make some sense. It has brought together all the pieces to allow the telecommuter to feel as if he or she is working in an office attached to the home network and using the company PBX.

The linchpin of the TCS offering is its network. The company has POPs in eight cities with a Frame Relay/ATM switch. "That configuration allows us to connect traditional ISDN and/or analog dial-in people, but we can plug the cable-modem network into that." TCS is working to be able to hand off all the forms of access to the enterprise in a single pipe.

That will include DSL, as well as ISDN or cable. "The DSL guys have all this cool high-speed technology, but the problem is they don't have very big footprints yet," Schilling says. "It's nice when it's available, but cable modems are available other places. When you're a company looking at telecommuting, and you want to try to service a large population, it's not easy to say, `Well, yes, but only if DSL,' or `Yes, but only if ISDN.' So part of our core strategy is to blend all of these together through a single pipe. We are clearly playing a watch-and-see. We'll adapt to all of it, and, as this thing fleshes out, we'll start picking favorites."

TCS sells its service at a flat monthly rate. That's significant when you consider that VPN services are charged by the hour, as are I-VPNs and services sold through 800 numbers. "What we say is, we'll sell this beginning at 35-bucks-a-month flat fee for 200-some-odd hours a month, and we'll do that for multiple locations around the country," Schilling says.