IT Procurement Function Set-up – Procurement Policies and Licensing

Our client is a leading global provider of professional assurance services that help businesses manage risk, improve sustainability and achieve their goals. With a globally known brand name, it is a trusted partner to a diverse range of clients worldwide.

Our client operates in a wide range of industries, including aerospace, automotive, food and beverage, healthcare, and more.

Challenge

As our client’s separation programme progressed, it became apparent that the size and complexity of the licensing challenge had been underestimated – with the licensing status not fully understood, several significant emerging risks and issues, and no plan for licensing that was fully developed, socialised, or managed against. Moreover, there was no capacity or capability within the client team to address the gap and bring clarity and focus to address this challenge.

Coupled with this challenge, as a new organisation, the client had yet to establish the set of overarching procurement policies and guardrails that would be needed to effectively run a procurement function post-separation.

This posed a serious risk to the separation programme – potentially holding up the go-live date, which would have serious operational and financial consequences for both buyer and seller.

Solution

Reporting in as a high profile workstream on the separation programme, we provided a small team to:

• Rapidly establish a core set of procurement policies and guardrails that would be usable from day one
• Rapidly appraise the licensing arrangements for each technology component (e.g. software applications), prioritised by renewal dates, service go live dates and end of Transition Service Agreement dates
• Created and maintained a single source of truth for licensing – cross referencing and combining with a master application catalogue
• Advise the procurement function on which technology components needed licensing arrangements putting in place and by when
• Summarise the licensing risk exposure to the client and pragmatic mitigations with clear actions plans
• Rapidly develop and implement a business-as-usual license management process.

Outcome

Our client’s IT and procurement function benefited from:

• A best practice set of procurement policies that were easy to communicate and maintain going forward
• Detailed understanding of licence risk exposure post-separation
• Rapidly resolved licensing issues / licensing compliance – meaning the separation go-live stage gate could be passed
• Pragmatic and auditable licensing process for business-as-usual activities post separation.

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