How an alco-bev major reduces IT costs with software asset management

Established in 1997, with a current employee count of more than 28,000 employees, this alcoholic beverage company wanted to improve its existing software asset management processes. The company believed that better software asset management would enable it to perform near real-time reporting on its software assets to deliver cost savings. Managing software costs was important for the company particularly due to cost pressures resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The company considers SAM (Software Asset Management) as a powerful lever to drive software compliance strategy. It believes that by enhancing its software asset management process, it would be able to develop a robust tooling infrastructure for near real-time license compliance position reporting, generate informative data points to enable senior management with key decision-making and deliver cost savings.

To enhance its SAM process, understand its IT infrastructure better and manage software assets in a more efficient way, the company decided to work with EY owing our vast knowledge and experience gained from successful delivery of SAM solutions across a large client base over the years. In addition to its primary objectives, the company also wanted to be adequately prepared for software audits performed by different software publishers.

The initiative of managing software assets for the company was sectioned into four core areas:

By conducting a thorough workshop at the company, we devised a step-by-step approach and compiled a project plan with set milestones. An overview of the approach to deliver the SAM solution for the company is below.

1. Conduct interactive workshops with different stakeholders within the company to understand the IT infrastructure, current SAM process (from demand management, procurement, deployment, maintenance, and retiral/renewal of software).
2. Compile current SAM process understanding and perform gap assessment basis guidelines as per industry leading practices and the ISO 19770-1:2017 framework.
3. Establish a To-Be SAM process enhancing the current process.
4. Assist the SAM team to seek internal approvals from IT and Security teams for installation of EY ATOM and procure hardware to initiate installation.
5. Deploy and implement EY ATOM and enable IT estate and software usage discovery, software license compliance reporting and dashboarding.
6. Perform contractual assessment of scoped-in software publishers and prepare entitlement summary.
7. Upload all available contractual information in EY ATOM and start performing compliance reporting.
8. Prepare a renewal calendar basis available contracts and assist with renewals and true-up accordingly.
9. Publish an audit management handbook and frontend external audits on behalf of the company.

The proprietary tool implemented, EY ATOM has an on-demand dashboard integrated that showcases current entitlements of software, its consumption over different geographies, outstanding risks and exposures and upcoming renewals. 

Some of the several features of the tool are:

While we continue to assist the company to increase the coverage of the in-scope hardware assets (laptops, desktops, servers, etc) through the ATOM tool, the software license compliance position reporting for the agreed publishers was initiated basis the hardware assets discovered already. With the reports being published, we had started generating cost saving avenues for the company while giving them better visibility of their IT estate and a better control of their software spend.

The company is not only able to perform better year-on-year software procurement, but also able to forecast their software consumption and spend for the next three years. We have successfully achieved near real-time software compliance position but also increased the visibility of the SAM team within the ecosystem of the company as an important lever in delivering cost savings.

Figure: Benefits of software asset management at an Alco-Bev company