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The best ideas in IT prove themselves beyond theory. They come from the people doing the work on a day-to-day basis, the ones who’ve built something, fixed something, or learned a lesson the hard way. These are the people we want to sit down with.
In our recurring Q&A series “3 Questions to…” we bring you thought leaders from across our partner network, one conversation at a time. Only three questions. Only three answers. But plenty of insight. Your knowledge snack for in-between.
For close to 25 years, SBF ITN Solutions has helped businesses get their telecommunications and IT infrastructure under control. The company specializes in mobile lifecycle management, unified communications, network infrastructure, and digital transformation. What sets it apart is independence. SBF ITN Solutions advises as a consultant, not a reseller that has a stake in the outcome.
That independence shows up in the mix: tariff optimization, IT and UC consulting, and strategic provider negotiations, backed by a full 360-degree approach to mobile lifecycle management. Pairing that strategy with operational data from the fleets SBF manages lets SBF cut telecom costs and modernize communication systems without pushing any vendor’s agenda.
Based in Osnabrück, Max Schriever is an operations manager and consultant at SBF ITN Solutions. He brings 16 years of experience in mobile management, telecom expense management, digital infrastructure, framework negotiations, and business communication solutions. That range of expertise lets him see companies’ IT and telecom strategies from the inside out, a vantage point few consultants in this space can match.
One of the first symptoms is a mismatch between the number of contract changes and the actual movement of people within the company. That mismatch means information is getting lost somewhere in the lifecycle. For every new joiner there should be a new order, and for every leaver a cancellation. If cancellations are missing, unused SIMs start to pile up. If there are fewer new orders than actual joiners, contracts are likely being passed between users without documentation, and every undocumented handover chips away at data integrity a little more.
Combine that with weak cost control and no monitoring at the individual contract level, and the data gap keeps growing quietly, without anyone noticing until an audit forces the issue.
The most surprising finding for most companies is how little mobile data their users actually consume. Across nearly every industry we work with, the majority of mobile contracts use only a small fraction of their included data allowance. Negotiating plans that match real usage, combined with a clear view of the current market, is by far the biggest cost lever we see, and it only becomes visible once you can compare data across thousands of lines rather than a handful of contracts.
Of course, tailor-made plans only work if monitoring keeps pace, so no one runs into a data shortage. That is where our data-driven approach to Telecom Expense Management (TEM) comes in: every single contract is monitored on a monthly basis.
Technology and carriers are no longer the obstacle in eSIM adoption. It comes down to process design and data integrity. eSIM outperforms the physical SIM in every aspect: it is more flexible, faster to provision, and more reliable. However, there are some additional steps in the process worth looking at. Where a physical SIM is simply mailed, an eSIM can be pushed directly to the device or activated electronically via QR code, which enables full automation of provisioning, provided the underlying data is always correct and available.
Deployment processes also need to account for the initial activation step, so devices can be onboarded with zero operational effort. Many companies shy away from these process changes simply because they lack the internal resources to monitor the rollout, even though the gains in speed and accuracy can be significant. A unified TEM and service scope removes that uncertainty and lets the company focus on its core business instead.
What Max describes is not a problem of effort but of visibility. Most IT teams are not failing to manage their mobile fleet through negligence; they simply never see the whole picture. What they miss is the cancellation that slipped through, the tariff nobody revisited, the phone still active long after its user left. That pattern is invisible at the scale of a single company, but once you can compare it against tens of thousands of lines, it jumps out immediately.
The same logic applies to eSIM. The technology has been ready for years. What holds enterprises back is not the carrier or the hardware; it is the state of the underlying data. In mobile lifecycle management, as in device lifecycle management generally, the real competitive edge is not the next shiny feature or piece of technology. It’s the unglamorous discipline of keeping data clean and organized.
