Managing Enterprise Data and Subscriptions Spend

How does your organization currently manage its spend on services used across the enterprise - from software and hardware to market data, research and subscriptions to telecoms, legal and consulting expenses?

• Is it still very paper-based with invoices pile up on the desks of your finance team, or worse, your business teams?
• Have you implemented shared exchange or Dropbox folders?
• Are they tracked using a mishmash of spreadsheets all owned by individual business units?

If you use any or all of these methods, do you find your organization facing these challenges?

Managing Different Service Provider Costs in Today’s Subscription Economy 💰

Financial institutions consume a broad range of services in order to meet their complex business needs in today's subscription economy.

These range from market data and electronic information services, to subscriptions for print and web-based publications.

But as firms look to minimize staff costs and capital expenditures, other services are increasingly consumed on a subscriptions basis, whether it’s consultancy services, software or something more physically tangible like telecommunications services and hardware.

In each of these cases, firms can benefit from proactive management of these service subscriptions.

As mentioned above, many firms still rely on complex spreadsheets or other tools supporting manual processes to manage their subscriptions.

By automating inventory management across the range of subscription services, firms can eliminate these manual systems and save time, money and resource 📉

Automating inventory control allows firms to analyze existing costs and predict upcoming spend relating to information and subscription services consumed across the enterprise.

This in turn supports accurate reporting of usage and cost data to your users, financial controllers and auditors, allowing you to deliver on cost transparency, and manage risk and compliance.

Finally, this approach supports supplier negotiations with evidence-based intelligent, helping to optimize contract renewals.

This approach to proactive inventory and subscription management applies to services across the board:

Market Data Inventory & Cost Management

Gaining control over data inventory through automation can allow firms to transform the way they manage their spending on market data and other information services.

What’s needed is the ability to track, organize and calculate costs related to all vendors, contracts, products and users 📊

In this way, firms are able to achieve cost optimization, process efficiency and compliance with licensing agreements.

Index License Management

The volume and cost of index licenses are mushrooming, making it difficult to manage licenses manually.

At the same time, contracts and vendor relationships previously owned by the business are being transitioned to central control.

This translates into a need to accurately track index licensing commitments, allocate costs, reconcile invoicing and provide cost transparency back to the business.

Research & Information Services

Firms need to be able to track and analyze their research and information services spend across the enterprise in order to manage costs.

But as with market data and index licensing, research and broader information services are becoming too complex to manage by spreadsheet.

This complexity means that firms need to automate their inventory and control systems for enterprise subscriptions in the same way they do for market data and other premium services.

This is particularly true as regulations like the EU’s MiFID II start to dismantle the bundling of research with execution services, forcing consuming organization to pay and provide transparency around the research they consume.

Software License Management

This level of discipline and control also applies to software licenses.

Undocumented software can pose risks to the firm, and lack of transparency around licensing obligations can result in unforeseen costs and penalties 📈

Firms need to accurately track the software licenses they have purchased.

This can yield benefits in terms of better visibility into spend, management of software license costs, and compliance with licensing agreements.

Hardware

As firms seek to transpose capital expenditures into operational costs, many are seeking to license hardware, in effect creating a subscription stream that needs managing.

But even where that isn’t the case, understanding the current status and usage of hardware platforms and associated operating software can reduce risk and help allocate costs to the business more accurately.

Consulting and Legal Services, and Expert Networks

Firms need to track and report on pre-paid balances for consulting and legal services consumed across the enterprise, as well as for services provided by so-called expert networks.

Additionally, for the latter, firms need to trace and allocate individual transactions back to specific deals and projects.

How Automating the Process Can Help ✅

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Automating the data service inventory process, allowing automatic uploads of inventory details and invoices, can yield benefits in a number of operational ways, and establish a reliable mechanism for handling all billing, ranging from the simple to the highly complex.

“Most obviously, automation streamlines the process. Automating clearly eliminates slow, expensive and error-prone manual processes.”

But it goes further than that. Once firms have implemented end-to-end order management, users are able to selfservice, yielding further operational cost reductions and other benefits 👩‍💻

At the same time, the invoice approval and accounts payable workflows can be added to the mix, again with associated operational benefits.

Finally, with a platform in place, administrators and procurement teams can survey consumers and users to identify and, if necessary, cancel under utilized or undervalued services.

The Benefits of a Central System for Enterprise Inventory and Cost Management

Adding centralized automation and workflow to the enterprise inventory management process, however, can offer other, bigger-picture benefits that allow firms to make a more proactive and strategic approach to managing their subscription services and suppliers.

These benefits relate to improvements in transparency and control that help get a clearer picture of ROI and address the needs of senior management for more information about the services consumed by the organization ✅

As is the case for all aspects of operational cost, management is under pressure to get an accurate, defensible view of expenditures on information and other third-party services.

A centralized, automated inventory system can offer complete cost visibility to business users and line managers, allowing them to see which services are being consumed and by whom.

Modern reporting, analysis and dashboarding capabilities can allow users and managers to quickly assess services consumption 👨‍💻

Automation can be used to generate scheduled reports to appropriate recipients, and supports distribution contract action notifications as and when they are need. It also prevents unwanted auto-renewals or expirations.

“From a control perspective, a centralized automated approach to inventory management helps in a number of ways.”

First, an automated system can introduce robust invoice reconciliation that can be used to identify billing errors and eliminate overpayments, a common problem for financial institutions trying to manage complex array of sometimes overlapping services.

Through automating the inventory and invoicing processes, firms are able to capture accurate real-world information about the services they are consuming.

This can be used to get a firm grip on even the most complex commercial arrangements and pricing structures.

Armed with this level of accuracy and granularity, managers can enter negotiations with more confidence in their own understanding of the situation and expect to maximize their purchasing power 😎

At the same time, they can ensure compliance with licensing agreements, ultimately yielding improved relations with suppliers.

Checklist: 7 Steps to Build a Business Case for an Enterprise Inventory and Cost Management Platform📝

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“The benefits of implementing a centralized enterprise inventory system are clear, particularly to those closest to the information and related services procurement process.”

But as with any ‘enterprise’ project, securing budget and selling the concept internally can often prove difficult. There are 7 steps that can be taken, however, to secure buy-in from senior management and other influencers 👇

(View checklist as PDF)

Implementing a centralized inventory and management system for market data and other subscription-based services necessarily involves the kind of enterprise engagement with stakeholders affected by the change.

Approaches to Implementing a Central Platform 🕵️

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Given the nature of the beast, implementing a centralized inventory and management system for market data and other subscription-based services necessarily involves the kind of enterprise engagement with stakeholders affected by the change.

As with most enterprise-scale projects, there are at least two schools of thought on the approach.

The one you choose will depend on the internal landscape of your firm, in terms of functional and business line organization, the path to securing budget (and satisfying stakeholders) and good old-fashioned politics.

The first approach is metaphorically to go through the front door. In this case, as with making the initial business case, communications is key.

It’s essential to keep key stakeholders and influencers apprised of timelines and developments throughout the implementation process 📑

As the system moves into production, a ‘single view’ mechanism – a dashboard providing full transparency across the range of spending categories covered – can be useful in terms of demonstrating progress and value – beyond the initial remit of financial information services.

An alternative approach is to identify an internal ‘early adopter’ for the system; often, this will be a specific department that has identified a strong business need for the solution.

This narrow implementation can act as an internal reference site, offering prospective internal clients some insight of the value the centralized system ultimately will bring as well as a feel for how the roll-out will work.

Again, communication with stakeholders is key to success and buy-in 💬

“Whichever approach best suits your needs, it’s essential to identify key players involved in the project.”

Appointing a dedicated person and where appropriate further resource to spearhead the implementation is advised, allowing stakeholders to see a direct line to those responsible for delivering according to requirements, timelines and budget.

Being able to measure success also helps with building the business case.

You can look for metrics around the comparative cost of operations and the improved efficiencies and cost optimization that comes with a centralized and managed approach.

Ready to Optimize your Enterprise Data and Subscriptions Spend Management? 🚀
We think you are! 👇