The rationale behind pooled corporate or pooled family plan minutes is to apply under-used minutes in a given month towards those users who exceed their allotted minutes. This redirects the cost management focus to minute totals and away from individual usage totals.  Nevertheless, the pools still need to be managed, and not everyone should be in the pool.
 
Regardless of the benefit that appears to come from using pooling minutes, if there are consistent users that exceed 700 or 1,000 minutes per month, you will save money by taking those users out of the pool.  This is because the cost per minute for pooled minutes or family plan minutes are higher than the cost for large minute individual plans.
 
Another drawback of unmanaged pooling is that it can produce a false sense of security.  The presence of a corporate pool does not eliminate the cost of non-business usage of company cell phones, it is only lost in the noise. Since there is such a penalty to running over plan minutes, this becomes a distraction where most of the energy is spent making sure the corporate pool is big enough to cover the minutes when it  should really be spent on analyzing whether the current minutes are at an appropriate level and how to minimize non-business usage. The same problem exists for pooled minute users as for non-pooled, ensuring that the minutes used are consistent with the companies intended usage for that asset.
 
The final challenge that emerges from pooled minute plans is the task of equitably disbursing the corporate charges. If an individual or department exceeds their budgeted minutes, it draws directly from other users.  None of the carriers provide a convenient way to equitably spread charges based on usage within the company pool.  Departments that over use should bear a disproportionate amount of the cost based on their over usage creating an incentive for greater control and scrutiny.  In fact they usually are allocated charges based on their budgeted plan minutes, an interesting reward for mismanagement.
 
To address this problem what is needed is the ability to allocate budgets by department and then prorate expenses based on usage not budgets.  Departments that exceed their minutes and drive the company over its allotment should pay the penalty of airtime charges, not those departments that stayed within their defined minutes but happen to make calls late in the month. In actuality, managing pooled minutes is even a more complex challenge than normal rate plan accounts, even though the payback may be significant.  Without the use of an automated tool, this approach may actually be encouraging abuse.  The more sophisticated tool vendors have solutions that allow the distribution of individual/departmental budgets and monitor use relative to those budgets.
 
The best solution to managing pools is to select a tool from wireless cost management specialists that will permit the automated management of pools.  One of these tools is MobilSentry, by MobilSense Technologies, Inc.  You can find out more by visiting www.mobilsense.com.