A vendor by vendor inventory of where your enterprise software spend is leaking, with quantified savings against each line. Six weeks. Fixed scope. Fixed fee. 100 percent buyer side. No reseller fingerprints.
The Software Spend Assessment is the entry point to the Redress practice. It is a structured six week engagement that produces a vendor by vendor inventory of where your enterprise software spend is leaking, with quantified savings against each line. The output is a board ready document, not a slide pack. Most enterprises use it as the starting point for a renewal program or a procurement reset.
The assessment is run by partners with twenty years average experience inside Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce, IBM, Broadcom, AWS, Google Cloud, ServiceNow, Workday, and Cisco enterprise sales. The work is independent. We have no reseller agreements with any of the publishers we assess. Read also the Benchmarking service, Vendor Shield, and the Renewal Program.
The assessment looks at every enterprise software contract above a defined materiality threshold and runs three reviews against each. The contract review identifies non standard terms, missing exit clauses, and pricing protections that have lapsed. The deployment review matches actual usage against the entitlement and surfaces shelfware, overdeployment, and metric drift. The market review benchmarks the unit economics against comparable Fortune 500 deals from the prior twelve months.
The output is a single document, structured by vendor, with a recommendation against each contract. Each recommendation has a number against it. The number is the savings opportunity, expressed in absolute dollars and as a percentage of current spend. The total at the bottom is the assessed savings opportunity for the enterprise.
The assessment covers the eleven publishers that account for ninety percent of enterprise software spend in most global enterprises. The depth of review depends on the materiality of the spend with each publisher.
The scope is fixed at the start of the engagement and does not change during the six weeks. The deliverables are the same for every assessment, regardless of vendor mix. The format is consistent because the recommendations need to be comparable across vendors and across years.
The assessment runs in six weeks of structured work. Week one is data collection. Week two is contract review. Week three is deployment review. Week four is market benchmarking. Week five is recommendation drafting. Week six is the executive readout and document handover. The work is run by a partner and a senior consultant from the relevant practices, with subject matter input from the practice leads for each vendor in scope.
The data collection burden on the client is light. We typically need one workshop per vendor with the procurement and software asset management lead, plus access to the contract repository and the deployment data. The pre assessment readiness checklist covers the data we will ask for in week one.
The assessed savings opportunity varies by vendor mix, contract age, and renewal calendar. The pattern is consistent. The assessed savings opportunity averages eighteen percent of in scope annual spend. The realized savings depend on which recommendations the enterprise chooses to act on, and on the negotiation execution, but the assessed number is the floor under any subsequent renewal program.
Selected outcomes are documented in our case studies, including the large US retailer Microsoft EA case study, the leading New York financial institution IBM audit case, and the Massachusetts university system SAP review.
The assessment is a fixed fee engagement. The fee is set at the start based on vendor count and complexity, and does not change during the six weeks. The typical assessment ROI on the assessed savings is between fifteen and forty times the fee. The realized ROI depends on execution, but the assessed number is the floor under that arithmetic.
Most enterprises move directly from the assessment into a Renewal Program or an Vendor Shield subscription, depending on the renewal calendar and the audit risk profile.
The right time to start the assessment is six to twelve months before the largest in scope renewal. Earlier is better. The work is most valuable when there is enough time to use the recommendations to shape the renewal strategy, rather than to react to a renewal that is already in flight. We will tell you on the first call whether the timing fits your situation.
The pre assessment self check used by more than two hundred enterprises before a Redress engagement. Twelve audit risk lines, structured by vendor, with a scoring rubric that flags where the highest risk sits.
Twenty pages. PDF plus interactive scorecard. The same framework we use in week one of every assessment.
The assessment found twenty two million dollars of savings against current spend in six weeks. The board signed off the renewal program in the same meeting they signed off the assessment.
Six weeks. Fixed scope. Fixed fee. Vendor by vendor savings inventory across the eleven major publishers. Thirty minute scoping call. No obligation.
Renewal precedents, audit movements, discount benchmarks, and assessment findings across the eleven publishers.
