I’ve had the pleasure of working with Conga over the past eight months as they’ve transitioned from their manual spreadsheet to Productiv for SaaS management. I’ve worked closely with Vinitha Jeevarathnam, IT Senior Program Manager, in on-boarding and training at Conga and recently caught up with her to share her perspective on modern SaaS management.
What’s your role at Conga?
There are a lot of facets to my role, I lead Vendor Management Operations and Procurement Management Operations, this includes setting standards and processes for projects such as app roll-outs, and responsible for maintaining our enterprise application portfolio.
What was the problem you were facing?
Before Productiv, we used a sprawling spreadsheet with 30 columns and around 200 rows to organize IT applications. It was very time-consuming to maintain, train different stakeholders, and we occasionally experienced data errors.
In particular, one recent app auto-renewal surprised us – $10K in cost which could be completely avoided. Our CIO, Praniti Lakhwara, is data-driven and it was apparent our current process was not scaling. With our growing portfolio we decided we needed a centralized platform to empower IT in managing renewals, collaborate with finance, and to build a scalable process.
What made this a challenging, yet critical, problem to solve?
SaaS portfolio information is spread across diverse systems – to fully analyze an application I needed to pull data or request data from 4-6 sources, NetSuite, Expensify, Admin dashboard, and SSO just to name a few. Additionally, we had no systematic way of monitoring Shadow IT, tracking apps being organically adopted and apps that might be redundant to our current portfolio.
How is Productiv helping solve this problem?
Productiv quickly helped us achieve our primary goal of app portfolio visibility. We have not only replaced the enterprise application spreadsheet but gone beyond it with additional capabilities from Productiv, some of the major benefits are:
- Renewal management to ensuring we are fully prepared for vendor management and renewal conversations. We saved 30% on a recent renewal for esignatures.
- Calls to action – Productiv provides alerts on tool adoption, unusual spend, rightsizing opportunities. Previously, after-the-fact renewals were a big problem, we lose any negotiation leverage once a renewal goes past renewal date. Happy to say this doesn’t happen any more – problem solved. Period.
- Productiv surfaces the full app story by showing engagement and login data, something we didn’t track previously. Helped us drive migration.
What are you looking forward to with Productiv?
The SaaS spreadsheet was pretty basic and so we were unable to do portfolio-wide analysis such as app redundancy. Additionally we didn’t have any information on logins or engagement without manual data pulls that quickly became outdated. With the replacement of the spreadsheet, I’ve reclaimed 2-3 hours each week which I can use for more thorough analysis.
I’m looking forward to fully leveraging the application comparison feature, which will help us go from reactively managing renewals to proactively shaping our app portfolio.
App admins are always concerned whether their customers – Conga employees – have the right tool and license to best perform their job. Productiv’s automated license management workflows easily help save money and avoid the manual tasks of license management.