Using Telecom Expense Management Rules

A telecom expense management (TEM) rule monitors the usage of cellular data and voice minutes for a device or group of devices, allowing you 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, and even set follow-up actions when a threshold is hit such as sending messages to devices or moving devices to other device groups.

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, namely that SOTI MobiControl can only track cellular data usage on iOS devices, not voice minutes. Furthermore, SOTI MobiControl can only collect statistics when the iOS device agent is in the foreground; unless Location Services are enabled on the device and the device is using a SOTI MobiControl SDK-enabled application.

Telecom Plans

When setting up your TEM rule, 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. Generally, you should use the corporate group plan when the TEM rule 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 rules are intended only as 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 a SIM card is switched
  • If the SOTI MobiControl device agent is uninstalled (and then reinstalled) on the device
  • If the Network Statistics setting on the device is reset