How Showpad’s Procurement Team Re-Imagined SaaS Management with Zylo

Challenge 1

Lack of Visibility into SaaS Spending

Showpad was founded just a decade ago in Ghent, Belgium. But in those 10 years, the company has experienced explosive growth. Today, Showpad has 450 employees working in offices across the globe.

The teams at Showpad depend on a growing number of SaaS applications to stay connected and efficient — wherever they’re based. This is even more true today, when the majority of employees are working from home.

But managing all of these SaaS applications became challenging — not to mention time consuming — for Showpad’s IT, InfoSec, and Procurement teams.

The team created a complex spreadsheet to keep track of all applications at the company. But because applications frequently come in and out of use, keeping an updated record was difficult. What’s more, SaaS is occasionally purchased by individuals and teams throughout the company, potentially contributing to shadow IT growth. That meant there was no surefire way to determine whether there were unknown applications missing from the spreadsheet.

This lack of full visibility made it difficult for Showpad to manage the applications they had. What’s more, strict data security and compliance requirements made it essential that Showpad eliminate shadow IT and gain full visibility into their SaaS portfolio — fast.

Discovering all SaaS in use was Showpad’s first priority.

“Zylo made it easy to discover all of the SaaS applications that we have — regardless of who purchased them,” said Pieter-Jan Cuvelier, Showpad’s procurement manager. “Full visibility has been foundational for improving the way we manage SaaS.”

Challenge 2

Identifying Savings Opportunities — Quickly and Continuously

Over time, the needs of any business change and evolve. Showpad, like many other companies, had to make decisions about where to scale up or scale down software spending. And they wanted to make those decisions quickly.

Thanks to Zylo, the procurement team and all relevant stakeholders at Showpad have easy access to all SaaS contracts, renewals, and utilization data. And to date, they’ve used this data to identify €500,000 in savings in less than nine months.

“We wanted the ability to act very fast to identify savings opportunities,” said Cuvelier. “If we didn’t have full visibility into our application portfolio with Zylo, it would have been a huge manual task.” Pieter-Jan Cuvelier, Procurement Manager, Showpad

Challenge 3

Unexpected Renewals

At Showpad, SaaS renewals are a frequent occurrence. But historically, it was challenging to stay on top of them.

The Showpad team manually logged renewal dates for all known SaaS applications within their SaaS Management spreadsheet. And the team would check the spreadsheet daily so they knew when to expect a renewal.

Of course, the spreadsheet method was prone to error. It was common for the team to get unexpected 30-day auto renewal notices for SaaS applications, with little to no time or data to make informed renewal decisions.

However, the procurement team now gets automatic renewal alerts from Zylo, which empowers them to proactively plan for renewals. In fact, Cuvelier and his team now start discussions with business units three to four months prior to a renewal and leverage data to determine whether or not to renew an application.

Showpad also leverages usage data and goes into renewal negotiations more informed.

“Within one week of using Zylo, we’d already experienced positive ROI,” said Cuvelier. “We found out about a renewal nobody was aware of and were able to cancel because the tool wasn’t being used.”

Challenge 4

No Single Source of Truth for LOB Decisions

At Showpad, a significant portion of technology costs typically come out of line of business (LOB) budgets. But there was no single source of truth business owners could access to get the information they needed to determine ROI and make better purchase decisions.

“Our goal is to ensure Zylo is used across all departments as a single source of SaaS truth,” concluded Cuvelier. “That’ll empower all of our business owners to make better spending decisions.”

With Zylo, teams will no longer have to track down the most accurate, up-to-date contract details. Instead, all business owners will have access to a single SaaS system of record that includes spend, contract information, and utilization data for every SaaS application in use.