ModMed Drives Operational Excellence & Million-Dollar Savings with Zylo SaaS License Management

CHALLENGE

Tracking Software and Licenses in Spreadsheets Was Like “Playing Whack-a-Mole”

Modernizing Medicine (ModMed), the leading specialty-driven electronic health record provider, was growing rapidly and had expanded to international locations. To fulfill its mission to put doctors and patients at the center of care, Trenton Cycholl, VP of IT and Digital Business at ModMed, knew they needed to simplify technology, control and reduce costs, and drive operational excellence.

Yet disparate applications and data created a chaotic software environment, making it difficult to identify and remove waste from their inventory. They constantly tried to find software and keep a spreadsheet up to date. As a result, application, usage, and contract data were often incomplete and inaccurate, and the manual effort took hours—even days. 

It was like playing a game of Whack-A-Mole, according to Cycholl. “I have tried and failed using spreadsheets and multiple data sources to manage this challenge,” said Cycholl. “I knew a spreadsheet just wouldn’t work.”

As such, it became imperative to Cycholl to have centralized, actionable data that ModMed could trust – and also present confidently to their executive team.

“Prior to Zylo, getting data on application types, licenses, and users was a manual process that would take hours, even days. The data was often incomplete and inaccurate, and presenting it to executives with confidence was a challenge. With Zylo, we now have a centralized platform that provides accurate and timely data, giving us full confidence.”
—Trenton Cycholl, VP of IT and Digital Business at ModMed

SOLUTIONS

Scale Programmatic SaaS License Management Using Deprovision Workflows for $1.4M in Cost Avoidance

With 224 applications, ModMed knew scaling license management across all its usage-based applications wasn’t possible without automation. Using Zylo’s deprovision workflows, the IT team reclaimed 2,800 licenses for $1.4M in cost avoidance.

Zylo Insights was instrumental in automatically analyzing usage data, identifying applications with unused licenses, and recommending opportunities to reclaim those licenses. From there, the team further investigated those recommendations with application owners to determine whether an application was a good candidate for a license deprovision workflow.

For Cycholl, it was essential to focus on opportunities that would drive the most value. When it came time to prioritize what actions to take, the team factored in applications with the lowest license usage, timing of contract renewals, and application tier.

Once ModMed prioritized the opportunities to go after, it was time to run a workflow in Zylo. “Zylo Workflows is a critical piece to automating and scaling our license reclamation efforts,” said Cycholl.

The automation inherent in Workflows enabled IT to scale license reclamation requests to all inactive users. To make this successful, IT worked with the Communications team to drive awareness across the business, instilling the importance of responding to requests to reclaim their licenses.

Automating this business process has enabled ModMed to manage and optimize licenses on an ongoing basis, eliminating the inefficiencies of the previous manual approach.

Align with Procurement on Renewals to Drive $1.6M in Cost Savings

From the beginning of its partnership with Zylo, ModMed set a goal to reduce SaaS costs by 10%. To date, they are halfway to that goal, having secured $1.6M in cost savings. They did this by rightsizing license quantities at renewal and canceling 122 unused applications — shrinking their stack by more than half.

A prime contributor to that was effective collaboration across the business – especially with their Procurement team. “Building a great working relationship across IT, Procurement, and all the application owners was important due to the decentralized nature of SaaS,” said Cycholl.

With Zylo as the source of truth for both teams, license optimization is now a regular ongoing process at ModMed.

One hundred twenty days before each renewal, IT runs a workflow to reclaim unused licenses. That gives Procurement ample time to meet with vendors to negotiate appropriate license quantities or cancel the subscription if needed.

To keep stakeholders accountable to their goal, ModMed uses Zylo Savings Center to track cost avoidance from deprovision workflows and realized cost savings. “Zylo helped us hold teams accountable for realizing these savings and reinvesting them back into our business,” said Cycholl.

“Don’t just look at [SaaS Management] as a cost-cutting effort,” said Cycholl. “You’re setting a foundation for awesome employee experiences, efficient operations, and driving more investment into innovation.”

Establish a SaaS System of Record and Centralize Usage Data for 157 Applications

To establish its SaaS system of record, ModMed used Zylo’s AI- and machine learning-powered Discovery Engine to uncover 224 applications and categorize them. Then, the team onboarded the applications into Zylo, bringing along key metadata for each application, adding contracts, and setting up custom fields for reporting.

“Centralizing key data is an absolute step zero,” said Cycholl, “and Zylo was a quick and simple way to accomplish this.”

With hundreds of applications, ModMed’s IT team knew they could not manage each one with the same level of rigor or support. As such, they organized applications into three tiers based on IT ownership, criticality to the business, and connectivity to other applications. For Tier One apps, IT provides full end-to-end management, while their role is more administrative and consultative for Tiers Two and Three.

Now with a system of record established, the next step was to centralize usage data. ModMed set up direct usage and single sign-on (SSO) integrations to funnel data into Zylo. Because SSO data is limited to login information, the team also employed Zylo’s Usage Connect, a connection method that brings in usage data for thousands of apps with a no-code experience.

“Within a few clicks, I quickly and easily connected multiple new applications to Zylo using Usage Connect — applications where we previously had no actionable data without significant manual manipulation,” said Mohamed Safiedine, Director of Digital Business Operations at ModMed. 

Now, 157 applications have usage data, setting the stage for ModMed’s software license management program.

“Zylo’s Usage Connect is a game-changer when it comes to effectively managing our SaaS,” said Safiedine.