It’s time to ditch those app procurement spreadsheets

By CDOTrends editors

Software procurement can be daunting and frustrating for businesses, especially when dealing with hundreds of applications and dozens of stakeholders. The traditional approaches of spreadsheets, meetings, and one-off online conversations no longer work at scale, and they don’t align the right people at the right time to make data-led decisions. As a result, procurement, finance, and IT teams are under tremendous pressure to optimize software spend, eliminate waste, and drive higher value during purchases and renewals.

Productiv recently launched the App Procurement Hub, an add-on to the company’s SaaS Intelligence™ Platform, to make the software procurement process easier and more efficient.

The new module attempts to replace frustrating, complex manual activities with automation and data-driven collaboration, making aligning software and services intake and renewal decisions easier for stakeholders.

A recent Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study showed that Productiv turned incomplete purchasing and renewal data into a single source of truth, allowing teams to align and decrease time spent on renewal preparation by 65% in year one, by 70% in year two, and by 75% in year three.

Additionally, customers used insights based on benchmarks, vendor intelligence, app usage data, and license recommendations to negotiate confidently and minimize risk– and save over USD130,000 annually.

The App Procurement Hub’s main task is to transform siloed, disconnected software procurement processes into automated, customizable workflows within minutes, helping save businesses up to USD275,000 in license costs annually, according to Productiv.

“Buying and renewing software never stops — but it’s a stressful process. We’ve heard from many businesses that procuring software is broken, causing unnecessary friction for the teams who are responsible for purchasing decisions,” said Alok Ojha, chief product officer at Productiv.

Key capabilities of the App Procurement Hub include a no-code workflow builder, app renewal requests, two-way integration with Slack, app intake requests, and vendor risk assessments.

The workflow builder enables companies to create templates for intakes, renewals, and other processes without expensive licensing in other tools. App renewal requests allow stakeholders from multiple departments to align on renewals, discussions, and decisions using unique pricing benchmarks by app and license SKU.

With the two-way integration with Slack, stakeholders can collaborate and discuss application purchases or renewals in Slack channels. A dedicated Slack channel is automatically created when the app renewal is initiated.

Finally, the customizable intake form and integration with Productiv AppCenter streamline the intake request process. At the same time, the vendor risk assessments feature provides a central location for vendor business health data, security, privacy, compliance questionnaires and vendor-related documents and internal intelligence.

“Our App Procurement Hub changes the game by enabling companies to easily automate procurement processes, align stakeholders around trusted data and better negotiate using our unique insights with usage data, recommendations, benchmarks and vendor intelligence,” Ojha added.

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