Using Telecom Expense Management Policies

A telecom expense management (TEM) policy monitors the usage of cellular data and voice minutes for a device or group of devices, allowing you to track costs throughout your organization. In addition to passive monitoring, you can:
  • Set alerts to notify you when devices exceed their allotted limits.
  • Set thresholds to block further usage.
  • Set follow-up actions when a threshold is met, such as sending messages to devices or moving devices to other device groups.

This section has the following topics:

You can use TEM rules on the Android Plus, Apple, and Windows Mobile/CE platforms for devices with device agents installed. On iOS devices, TEM tracking has certain restrictions. For example:
  • SOTI MobiControl can only track cellular data usage on iOS devices, not voice minutes.
  • Statistics collection requires the iOS agent to be in the foreground unless:
    • You enable Location Services on the device.

    • The device uses a SOTI MobiControl SDK-enabled application.

Telecom Plans

When setting up your TEM policy, you must create a telecom plan that sets the data and voice limits. SOTI MobiControl compares the plan to the device(s)' usage to see if it exceeds the plan. You can create multiple telecom plans to match any plans present within your organization. There are two types of telecom plans: Corporate Group and Individual. You should use the corporate group plan when the TEM policy targets a device group rather than a single device.

Usage Tracking Considerations

Usage information collected by SOTI MobiControl may not match data usage reports from your telecommunications provider. TEM policies are a supplementary tool to help you track your devices' data usage.

In addition to general variances, the following situations may cause discrepancies between data usage statistics collected from SOTI MobiControl and those from your telecommunications provider:

  • If you switch a SIM card
  • If the device is actively using multiple SIM cards
  • If you uninstall and then reinstall the SOTI MobiControl device agent
  • If you reset the Network Statistics setting on the device