Analyzing information spend isn’t as simple as drawing a report from your e-procurement platform. Subscription expenditure has commodity-specific nuances that make it harder to analyze and manage. Yet finding a way to do this analysis really matters given that, for many organizations, subscription spend is such a substantial outlay.
In this article we’ll outline how Couranto Clarity helps by providing both birds-eye and detailed views of your information spend. We’ll also show how Couranto helps you optimize your information budget to better meet your organization’s needs.
Inventory and spend management
Information expenditure can easily drift over time, becoming increasingly opaque as various stakeholders add contracts. Part of the challenge is the procurement process for information services, a process that is often highly delegated, with different company divisions and teams all spending on information (and sometimes the same information). That makes it hard to get a grip on total spend and how this spend is spread out.
Couranto Clarity acts as an inventory management system that provides transparency, insight, and accountability into subscription spend, all in a centralized location. It means that you no longer need to rely on drawing hard-to-analyze inventory reports from vendors just to see where your subscription spend is going.
Clarity shifts the power from third-party suppliers to your own team which makes it easier to get a 360-degree view. Using Clarity you also gain far more insight into spend patterns than you’d see if you relied on data from your e-procurement system alone.
Rick information for better decisions
Couranto powers the unique analyses required for subscription spend by adding commodity-specific information that acts as a compliment to your own e-procurement system. Users enjoy all the advantages of integration with their e-procurement marketplace, but with the added nuance of detailed subscription information.
Put in simple terms, Clarity dashboards make it much easier to see which users and teams are paying for which subscriptions, and to what extent these subscriptions are being used.
For example, you enjoy an at-a-glance view of seat utilization, showing whether subscriptions are currently licensed at excess capacity. You can also choose to export the information into an Excel sheet for further, deeper analysis.
Insight into individual contracts
It’s equally important – and time consuming – to manage individual contracts, but this becomes much easier with Couranto Clarity. , For example, Clarity provides easy-to-access insight into each contract’s current and historical status. You’ll readily analyze historical spend on the contract, giving you a view into cost trends. This helps with negotiations when vendors push up price.
With Clarity you can drill down to deeper levels of detail – including viewing a list of titles covered under the subscription, which helps you gauge whether the contract remains good value for your money as titles come and go from a vendor’s portfolio – and without the need to refer to the vendor website to double check.
Thanks to an at-a-glance renewals dashboard, Couranto Clarity also helps you keep an eye on upcoming renewals, helping you plan your annual budgets to accommodate the lump sums required to pay for large, multi-year renewals.
Which spend challenges can Couranto solve?
Clear insight into subscription spend is helpful in many ways. First, it allows you to identify spend that is suboptimal. For example, distinct departments running several concurrent single-user contracts with the same vendor, contracts that could be consolidated into a larger, multi-user contract to save costs.
A single portal also allows you to better retain data: if a colleague moves on to another role you’re no longer dependent on how thoroughly the employee transitioned their workload. New joiners can get important insights much faster.
Spend insight also aids matters if your organization is going through major change such as a merger, or if a part of the organization is undergoing divestment. When that happens Couranto will give you a quick overview of your subscription spend so that you can allocate costs.
Vendors will comply with a data request, but you may not receive the data in time, and consolidating the data from multiple vendors could be hard. Clarity gets the job done.
Manage and optimize spend with Couranto
In allocating your information budget you need to ask the right questions – ideally via a needs assessment. But even a thorough needs assessment can leave you with gaps. Practical, on-the-ground evidence of information use and spend is essential.
Thanks to Couranto Clarity you can get an overview of subscription spend: it is a practical tool that helps monitor how information is used in practice. Get in touch with us now to find out more about how Couranto can help your organization manage subscription spend.
A WBENC and Disability:iN certified diverse company with more than 30 years experience in corporate
information contract management, Couranto serves clients globally with strategic programs that
maximize the value of information portfolios by reducing costs while improving access to licensed
content, data resources, intellectual property, corporate memberships and related contracts.
Couranto’s Discovery and Clarity platforms provide custom-configured end-to-end information access,
budget planning and license management tools. Built on deep expertise and a long history of client
successes, Couranto solutions add value to your information and help drive innovation throughout your
organization, creating enduring impact.
