Highlights
- Automated end-to-end renewal process
- Able to access accurate asset lists within 30 seconds to provide directly to customers
- Proactively assists customers mitigate IT risk caused by lapsed software licenses
- Consistently achieves 90%+ under-contract and monthly renewal rates
- Cloud-based solution with low set-up costs
- Seamless handovers during staff vacations ensuring no opportunities are missed
- Scalable tool that helps improve customer service through reporting
Company
Fujitsu is one of the world’s largest IT services companies with 159,000+ staff across more than sixty countries.
Fujitsu New Zealand employs around 800 staff, distributing and activating software on behalf of approximately 300 vendor partners including major authors such as Microsoft, VMware, Citrix, Adobe, Commvault, Symantec , and IBM.
Fujitsu is dedicated to providing clients with end to end licensing and software asset management services. Fujitsu service is highly regarded and its team’s extensive knowledge of licensing is essential to managing its customer’s compliancy as well as identifying the most optimum licensing solution for its customer’s needs.
Background
With a large base of licensing customers and more than 300 vendor partners, Fujitsu was tracking the assets and renewals manually. As the volume of licenses to be managed increased over time, the company investigated options to manage licences more efficiently.
Fujitsu realised that in order to mitigate customer risk of elapsed software licenses, improve customer satisfaction and provide business predictability to Fujitsu, it needed a system that automated the renewal process and tracked and stored assets for every customer.
Business Need
After considering a number of solutions, the team reviewed iasset.com and found that it could track and store assets by each customer within a single platform (avoiding the need to login into several different databases daily).
The platform also automated the entire renewal process end-to-end, which was critical to the overall management of Fujitsu’s renewals as well as accommodating growth of the renewal program. As a cloud-based tool it also provided Fujitsu with an evergreen solution that required no code level customization but enabled the flexibility required to tailor the solution to Fujitsu’s need.
From a cost perspective, iasset.com offered an easy cloud-based solution with low set-up costs.
Solution
The decision was made to deploy iasset.com as a stand-alone system to complement Fujitsu’s existing processes and systems. To get the system up and running, the team starting creating quotes from direct customer requests and historical data sources that had already been validated and requests received via their channel partners.
A series of workflows were created to automate the renewal process. This involved setting up rules and filters relevant to the customer and/or vendor requirements. When a renewal becomes due, iasset.com generates a quote, creating a task list for various team members to track and follow up. Once a purchase order is received from the customer, the team raise the invoice in the ERP system as well as updating the status in iasset.com to show the renewal is complete.
Over time as more and more quotes and renewals have been processed through iasset.com, the customer asset information has been cleansed and updated, improving the quality to the extent that Fujitsu team members are confident that the list of assets they regularly provide to end user customers is completely accurate.
Benefits
Within months of implementing iasset.com into its processes, Fujitsu saw several benefits, notably the customer service improvements realised by the Fujitsu team having complete control over the renewal process, being able to access asset data for every customer within 30 seconds and provide accurate customer reporting.
The ability for the system to be tailored by the team is a major advantage for Fujitsu. It provides them the ability to focus exclusively on their customer’s assets without having to sift through data, saving time and energy. This means more time is spent helping customers with complex licensing queries and less on reconciling data sources to extract accurate asset information.
Another internal benefit Fujitsu found was that when staff go on holidays, opportunities can be tracked and followed up by other users without any handover required, reducing the risk that opportunities lapse while someone is away.
Fujitsu has also received positive feedback from its customers that the quotes contain more relevant and useful information than previously.
By distributing monthly reports to key customers, Fujitsu provides them with visibility on their opportunity pipelines and software assets, which many customers now rely on as a way to keep track of their own software assets.
Overall, iasset.com provided Fujitsu with a scalable tool that has enabled them to improve the service they provide to their customers through comprehensive reporting and tracking of software assets. This has helped Fujitsu enhance its value and relationships with its customers.
Results
Since deploying iasset.com® over 12 months ago, Fujitsu now has cleansed and accumulated data that provides a true representation of their customer’s software assets with more than 90% under contract.
More importantly, the iasset.com platform enables Fujitsu to track every software license asset purchased by the customer, reducing risk of lapsed software licenses causing unsupported critical business application outages.
In addition Fujitsu proactively shares customer’s installed base information stored in iasset.com in the form of monthly reports giving customers greater insight into their software assets and assisting them to manage renewal expenditure accordingly.
"The data provided by iasset.com® has been critical in helping us and our customers understand their software assets and when items need to be renewed."
– Lisa Scott, Licensing Team Leader, Fujitsu New Zealand
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