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Reduce the Hidden Costs in Your Business Information Budget

There may be relics of the past looming in the background of your systems or subscriptions that are pulling away from your bottom line.

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For a large company, there may be relics of the past that you may not even know exist looming in the background of your systems or subscriptions, pulling away from your bottom line. Following a year like 2020, with the pandemic affecting sales and creating both labor and supply shortages, resulting in a tightening of operating margins for most industries, this is an opportune time to examine your costs to see where expenses can be cut, giving yourself some breathing room.

Easier said than done, of course, because all this relevant knowledge about subscriptions, information and software licenses, data contracts, corporate memberships, research and reprints tends to be spread out in the minds of multiple stakeholders, often located in different states and even different countries. To have one person who knows all the company's third-party information expenses is, for most organizations, unfathomable.

Having all your information contracts stored, managed and accessed in one convenient location with usage and cost reporting is a valuable asset for any company, providing managers with the tools they need to make the right information decisions for their organization. Often overlooked because many subscriptions constitute small monthly or quarterly investments, the total is still large, especially if it is not managed appropriately.

This is why Couranto continues to invest heavily in its Clarity platform. As an information inventory management system, Clarity operates as a virtual library that offers a single platform to manage licenses, market data, software, eContent, publications, corporate memberships, user access, user surveys, license renewals, and any other commodity paid as a subscription-based service. By consolidating access, aggregating usage data and reporting in a way that provides administrator insights, Couranto’s Clarity service enables you to identify cost cutting efficiencies including contracts and data sources that are over-bought and under-used.

Couranto delivers a single solution for purchasing, renewing, managing, paying and analyzing information asset contracts, and controlling user entitlements with a single sign-on. Within this virtual library of knowledge, you have a landing page that provides verified users with dozens of convenient functions including:

  • Catalog Search

  • A-Z Browser

  • Single Sign-On

  • Renewal Polling

  • Complete 24/7 Reporting

  • Compliance Assurance

  • Events Calendar

  • Ask the Librarian


Clarity helps administrators reduce costs by analyzing usage to eliminate unused assets and right-size those you keep, avoid contract duplication, consolidate contracts across regions and workgroups, prevent paid orders to included holdings, and assure timely renewals. For those companies that allocate license costs among users, Clarity's usage analytics capabilities provide an organization with rich data on an individual's usage within their departments and apply those costs to the departments using the license. This insight allows for an increased understanding of where a company's costs lay, as Clarity enables the establishment of clear KPIs for an organization's portfolio and inventory management.

Clarity also acts as a place to streamline license administration, allowing managers to:

  • Store contract documents

  • Quickly assign, revoke, reassign seats/access to content

  • Allocate costs across users/regions/departments

  • Integrate management of licenses and catalog items to provide a single unified Hub

  • Effectively block duplication of content

Together, Couranto’s Clarity platform provides one unified space, with one centralized bill, for your company to access and manage your licenses, contracts, memberships and subscriptions. Clarity offers unmatched benefits to company administrators and users alike, reduce costs and improving the usage and there improving the value of your information assets. Because managed well, information inspires innovation.



Information About the Author

NICK2

Nick Collison

Director of Business Strategy, Market Development, Library & E-Content

nick@couranto.com

Nick Collison has decades of experience in managing information access, budgeting, strategic planning, and knowledge services. Collison is a Fellow of SLA, the Special Libraries Association.