Stop Paying for Ghost Lines: A Decision-Maker's Guide (Concise Edition)

Two quarters ago, a leadership team I worked with thought their wireless run-rate was stable. Headcount was flat, hiring controls were in place, and no one had requested new device budgets. Yet invoices crept up month after month. A quick cross-check found what the spreadsheets hid: lines still active for people who had left, devices marked "spare" that were checking in from the field, and numbers ported to a new carrier but never disconnected at the old one. Within thirty days of cleaning it up, they dropped more than ten thousand dollars a month from their mobile spend and sailed through an audit that would have been painful. That outcome wasn't about heroics; it was about treating mobility inventory as a management system, not a project.

The business problem is simple to state and expensive to ignore. Mobility lives across multiple truths. Carrier are right about what they bill. Your TEM is right about contracted rates and usage details. ServiceNow (or your ITSM/CMDB) is right about custody and lifecycle. MDM/UEM is right about what's powered on and compliant. HR is right about who works here today. Each is accurate in its lane and out of sync with the others just often enough to leak money. Manual requests, emailed approvals, and re-keyed identifiers widen the gaps. Over time you pay for lines no one owns and you carry risk on devices no one can find.

What actually works looks deceptively straightforward. First, decide where each truth lives and write it down. Make HR the authority for people and status changes; let the CMDB own devices and custody; rely on the TEM for lines, plans, accounts, and invoice ingestion; and use MDM for telemetry and compliance. Treat the carrier as billing truth, not inventory truth, so you don't let the invoice dictate your asset list. That single decision eliminates circular debates and gives your teams a contract for how reconciliation will work.

Second, connect the systems so changes move without human relays. HR events should trigger entitlement creation and termination automatically. Device telemetry should update ownership and last-seen information in the CMDB without a ticket. Carrier feeds should land in the TEM as structured data, not as PDFs someone copies into a spreadsheet. Event-driven where possible, daily where it isn't - that cadence matter more than another dashboard.

Third, reconcile every night and manage only the exceptions. The mechanics are boring on purpose: normalize phone numbers to E.164 at the door; validate IMEI and ICCID formats; match on strong keys like phone number, employee ID, and asset tag; confirm secondaries like IMEI and ICCID to catch swaps and repairs. Anything that fails to line up becomes a work item with a single, obvious next step - assign an owner, suspend or disconnect, update the CMDB, or right-size the plan. All of those items flow to one ServiceNow queue with service-level targets measured in days, not weeks. When you centralize exceptions and time-box the response, inventory hygiene stops being "best effort" and becomes a predicable part of monthly close.

You don't need a transformation program to get results. In the first thirty days, map who owns which truth, fix data ingestion so bad identifiers can't get in, stand up a minimal view of four numbers - inventory accuracy, time to disconnect after termination, orphan-line rate, and monthly savings captured - and route exceptions to a single queue. In the next thirty, wire joiner-mover-leaver automation from HR, shift carrier inputs to structured feeds, and schedule the nightly reconciliation that opens the right playbook automatically. In the final thirty, tune plans and pools based on real usage, tighten eSIM governance so ICCID changes are logged and approved, and adjust staffing and RACI based on exception volume. By that point, the savings are paying for the program.

Executives don't need a wall of metrics; they need a few that describe control. Inventory accuracy tells you whether systems agree; healthy programs sit at ninety-eight percent or better in steady state. Time to disconnect after termination tells you whether risk is contained; best-in-class suspends immediately and disconnects inside a week unless there's a legal hold. Orphan-line rate should be near zero; anything above half a percent is a signal that ownership and custody need attention. Savings captured is the headline that funds everything else. In portfolios between two and ten thousand lines, first-pass cleanups routinely uncover one to three percent waste before any plan optimization which at typical net MRCs is real money, very month.

Sustaining the gains requires light but firm governance. Require a named owner, either a person or a stocked location for very line and device. Make suspend-within-forty-eight-hours and disconnect-within-five-business-days the default for departures. Barcode scan devices in and out of spares and make return kits and reminders automated rather than aspirational. Align lost-or-stolen handling with security so remote wipe, SIM-swap watchlists, and fraud monitoring aren't afterthoughts. These are simple rules that prevent backsliding, especially when exception SLAs are visible to the teams who own them.

If you remember one idea, make it this: decide where each truth lives, automate the handoffs, and manage only the exceptions. When you do, mobile spend stops drifting, audits stop stinging, and your teams stop chasing spreadsheets. The result is not perfection; it's consistency. And consistency is what turns mobility from a monthly surprise into a controllable line on the P&L.