3 New Ways Procurement Can Drive and Define Value with the Cloud

Cost Savings are Table Stakes for Procurement

As I’ve discussed in previous blogs, the idea of Procurement focusing on driving value for an organization, rather than solely pushing for cost savings, is an important topic amongst progressive Procurement teams. As a Procurement veteran myself, I can’t think of a single conference that I’ve attended or a user group that I was a part of that didn’t talk about the idea of moving “beyond savings” and “getting to value.”This concept isn’t new at all, but it represents a larger Procurement shift in that it appears that cost savings have become table stakes, and are almost viewed as the tactical component of Procurement, while defining and driving value of company investments has become the new strategic focus.

Collaboration and Value are More Important than Cost Savings

The interesting correlation, as I talk to Zylo’s IT customers and prospects every day, is that they are solely focused on value as well, and less focused on cost savings. They are managing large SaaS deployments of company-wide “backbone” solutions (think Salesforce, Workday, GSuite, etc), and their goal is to get as much value out of these solutions as possible, not drive savings and reduce licenses.Procurement is now being challenged to think like the functions they support, rather than thinking like a savings-hungry Procurement & Finance team. Collaboration is now > Governance.

SaaS Measurement and Optimization Drive Cloud Value for Procurement

At Zylo, we think about this trend every day. We’ve built our platform from the ground-up focused on measuring and reporting back on SaaS application value.By providing quick visibility into your SaaS software utilization, across a wide swath of your apps, and visibility into deep utilization, across your most important and strategic apps, Procurement teams can proactively drive application value within a company, and start thinking and acting like IT.Here are 3 ways Procurement can use the cloud shift to drive new value in the enterprise, and our customers are seeing results by doing this today:

1. Stratify Your User Base by User Type: How many times have you negotiated an “all-in” deal for a set number of licenses, where all of the licenses are the same cost, no matter if the users are active or not? With active user detail included in Zylo, you now can understand who your Power Users truly are, who is only accessing the application seasonally, how many licenses have yet to be deployed and who has infrequently or never used their application license. With that intelligence, you are armed to negotiate a new strategic deal, which aligns license types to the users in your organization, and you now understand your user base more than ever before.
2. Provide Proactive Training and Enablement: You made the decision as a company to invest in software that would have ROI far larger than your investment, right? Now that you’ve stratified your user base, you can target your power users and elevate their visibility in your organization, nurture your seasonal users, and provide training and enablement to your infrequent users. Now you can get strategic and maximize your ROI!
3. Understand How Ingrained an Application is in Your Company: With real-time views into active user counts by license type and org, you now have a pulse on how ingrained your most strategic deployments are in your company. You can see which user types are driving value, and report back on how these applications are driving critical business processes.

The shift to the cloud has created a massive shift in how companies buy and manage their software deployments. Now more than ever before, due to cross-functional alignment goals, Procurement is the single best-positioned function within a company to capitalize on this shift and drive net-new value for Cloud apps.