Best deal management software for Purchasing

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[Music] hello again and welcome back to our video channel I'm joined by Carly fallow once more and we're going to be talking this month about the software procurement process so we've made our in scuse me we've made our request we don't have any spare licenses so we need to actually go buy the license the honors the request so what are the steps that we're actually going to say just before we took three steps and challenges and stuff and it I think it's really important to note this is yet another process that we do not mine no and in fact it's often owned outside of our team and mind you we have a software asset managers have a huge role to play in making sure in supporting the procurement department and put you in teaming negotiating contracts and buying contracts okay you know the relationship between sulfur asset management and procurement needs to be really close yeah because as a top tip on that arguing the unit cost over a given price of software is all well and good and it does add a certain about you but when you cascade that up to how its deployed in the idea state and you throw CPUs that it's and then virtualization and you know being where we've got no one else you can blow that unit cost out of the water factly its buying software is really challenging mm-hm so it's it's a group activities yeah yeah won't you anyway so we're buying some software so we're buying some software first things first when we when we get that request in we want to make sure that we're not getting it off a post-it note or an email or a nod and a wink from a project manager we actually want to make sure that the request is coming through an authorized channel so that's tops here but number one there then we as said about validating that request so if for any reason a request has got through the perhaps and again wasn't on our supported software catalog for some reason IT have a feature that Google's and they don't validate or the line manager doesn't care or the request D doesn't care we need to act as a barrier to making sure we're not attempting to buy legacy software too so it's important you may have as well just not the top of my head certain checks and balances around dealing with vendors in certain countries I know this is particularly more relevant in the US than perhaps the UK but there's there's those sort of requirements I know particularly if you try and buy Oracle software one of the things they look to mandate their risk levels against is dealing with say like North Korea or performance law isn't it yeah so it's it's just want to watch out for them you don't just what I think oh boy something really yeah and if the piece of software isn't in yourself I cut along you need to refer the refer it back through to the process which will get it on to the software catalog if we can go out and buy it and then we actually go and there may be if it's a particularly large request or if it is for software that you've not purchased before you may need to go off into the contract management process which is another one owned by procurement which we will talk about later it's an advanced process and then once you have had the contract signed on the dotted line and you're able to actually just go and buy the software then you make make sure you know where you're going to buy it from and often again particularly for large large orders or for particular pieces of software you may already you know Oracle you may buy direct from Oracle Microsoft you may buy direct from our from Microsoft this sometimes it you might be going through a reseller so you know make sure you know where you're going to buy it and then you raise purchase order indeed and and part of that activity may have involved some sort of invitation to tender process as well because you want to drive competitive advantage through getting a decent deal so yeah if you mate you may have a routine in there so it's not to say that you as a software asset manager do that yourself no no but what's happening is procurement are doing it and you are providing them with data information to help them do that and you're also providing them with support and advice around the implications for instance of buying from 15 million different resellers rather than mmm buying three one yes a and and it's it's it's worth actually getting the kid but it's also worth having a look at the process as well because once once a request sort of gets launched over the fence as it were from a service management perspective you think oh well it'll just take a couple of days to raise the paperwork and off we go potentially there's a bit more involved in that when particularly with larger purchases so organizations have a decision to make at this stage and it's it's sort of a strategy strategic type principle that needs that organizations need to decipher themselves and that is do they deploy software before they have received an invoice and proof of entitlement for it or do they deploy it once they've raised a purchase order and then the risk of deploying it when you raise purchase order is that the purchase order might go astray and you never receive the invoice and proof of entitlement but you've just you've installed it and hey presto you're suddenly non-compliant if you decide you're not going to anything until you've received the invoice and the proof of entitlement that could take a while so your end-users a screaming or your project is screaming for software that they don't have and they can't it so again this is a classic case where we were saying that trade-off between compliance and speed of service it's really obvious in that instance so as an organization you have to decide that principle for yourself based upon your organizational priorities you're risk averse really focused on compliance or is you know agility flexibility getting stuff out so that you're in Jesus can you you can do what they need to do with that software is that important because that will determine which principle you apply and you know what you do if you if you follow me I'd sell don't you you just you just do the and the purchase at the same time and you merit you some later and do you don't worry about so it's fine it happens it's magic so so the software vendor will fulfill the purchase order now it's very tempting to upload your purchase order into your Sam tool yeah flush read you have to understand your proof of entitlement proof event ID what begins with an invoice and ends who knows where but an invoice is a really good start personally I'm I'm happy to rely on any employee yeah cuz it's it's nothing a possession is nine-tenths of the law and if you pay for it then there's a fair chance that you could yeah so you need to see you get your purchase order you need to make sure that you actually receive proof of entitlement okay so you might need to go and chase the supplier if does not set through the invoice one of the things I always say when I am helping build out suffer asset management is that you need to run what is called an open purchase order report and that is a report that tells you all the purchase orders that have been raised but for which you have not received an invoice so you need to engage with your finance team or your accounts payable team to ask them to create that report for you and ideally get them to run it themselves and then chase up the invoices but if that doesn't work then you get it sent to you and you chase the invoices up because a sure way to achieve non-compliance is to rely on a purchase order and not chase out the invoice to make sure you've received it and this is to where your license pool can come into its own then at that point as well because if you've got licenses in reserve you know you've got the the entitlements already so you can delve into that whereas if you're raining down or getting close to zero then perhaps it's time to reorder maybe don't even wait for that request to come through you know the churn for those software requests that are coming in so you know what degree of fact the company needs from a software perspective yeah so are there any other challenges are in this process I think patients I think there's a comms issue as well so when we because we are getting this over the fence potentially to procurement and saying you know guys make that Mendez yeah yeah under benders then a great place to look I think to see how it's done well is in operations management in manufacturing and they have this just-in-time principle they don't invest money in debt stock so they rely on third parties and a sort of supply chain to drive stuff through and they can't do that if unless they're talking and talking well to each other and frequently and unfortunately because IT attracts the introvert the last thing we actually want to do is pick up the phone and talk to people so so yeah we've got to establish we've got to build those bridges we've got to work those relationships and make sure that we don't sound like we're hounded procurement when we pick up the phone and say guys you know can you just know where we are can you keep us abreast of what's going on yeah yeah so off the back end of this process where do we head so from here we potentially head to the entitlement importation process because we've received the invoice we've received the the relevant entitlement we actually get it into our Sam tool we can also then go to a deployment you know this as well because we've we've got our entitlement therefore yes off we go we can honor the request yep and we also procurement we'll be doing a lot of stuff around contract management in vendor management mm-hm and depending on the software and whether or not we've got support maintenance or whether it's a subscription we will possibly need to managerial at some point as well yes yes that will that should be part of I would argue part of the entitlements implementation process because once we imported it we should be setting the flags to say when it's due for renewal Thanks yep so that's that's it for the purchase process it is until next month see you later it's okay