As Software Asset Professionals, we spend a great deal of time creating policies and procedures around new purchases, audits, contract reviews, terminations and generally managing the intake or offboarding of software. All that is very important and essential for a robust SAM program.

However, there is often a process area of ITAM that is often just assumed to be working efficiently. But are we passing up some gold by just assuming efficiency? In just making sure that renewals go downstream and get processed on time, your ITAM program is missing some SAM opportunities.

Is your program panning for gold by doing the following:

Sending out renewal notifications in a timely manner. A timely manner considers the various termination dates for each renewal (30, 60, 90 days). Are you sending out notifications in time enough to action any optimization efforts if necessary?

Know who makes the final decision. As noted above, timing is crucial. Just knowing what cost center pays is not enough. Who cares about the functionality, uses it or doesn’t? It is important to note that while renewals are top of mind for the SAM team, that is not the case for the stakeholders. You need to build in discussions time, depending on the complexity of the renewal.

Not all software renewals are created the same. Some are just more complex and take more time than others. Know which ones are just going to take more time because of a variety of factors: number of skus, metric change, termination, sku growth, etc. Find some way of identifying and recording the complexity as you work them now for the next renewal.

Have a good pan. Invest in some type of tool that assists in recording and alerting the SAM team of all the previous data points. Often there is a tool already in house that can be fitted to that purpose.

Here is where you count the gold you caught as it was going downstream by using the previous actions. Track every penny saved or cost avoided. EVERY DOLLAR. It will add a lot of gold to the total gold that the SAM team saves the organization.

Don’t let possible software renewal savings gold, go tumbling downstream and out of reach. Catch it before it is out of reach. Start panning now.