The Goal
A top-ranked university in the US was looking for a more efficient and cost-effective way to distribute software on campus, while incorporating more consistency into their processes and the end-user experience. The school’s IT Services Software Licensing Team was tasked with finding a way to accomplish this.
The Challenge
This institution faced financial and logistical barriers to improving their license-distribution process. Their three most significant challenges are summarized below.
- Cost Neutrality
The Software Licensing Team’s mandate required that they distribute licenses in a cost-neutral fashion. This means that they had to effectively fund their own team and cover all license costs through charges applied to departments and faculty for software. They were obligated to recoup 100% of their operating costs every year. This would be challenging for any organization, much less a team of six people responsible for distributing thousands of software licenses. - Manual Processes
The school had a website through which students and faculty could order the software they needed easily enough. However, all orders had to be fulfilled manually by the Software Licensing Team, using spreadsheets to track licenses and USB keys to provide software. For a small team serving software the needs of thousands of students and faculty, this was an enormous burden. - Long Waits
The institution’s means of distributing software was inconvenient for more than just the Software Licensing Team. While the team struggled to keep up with incoming orders, their limited resources and manual processes were resulting in long delivery delays. Simply processing payments at the end of every month took eight days on average, and students could be left waiting for over a month to finally receive their software.
The Solution
The challenges of manually fulfilling orders with a small team in an efficient and cost-neutral fashion led the Software Licensing Team to look into third-party solutions. This, in turn, led them to Kivuto.
To meet the school’s requirements and address their pain points, Kivuto recommended its flagship product – Kivuto Cloud
Kivuto Cloud is a central platform through which schools can manage and distribute any type of digital resource to students, faculty, and staff. With advanced security and compliance-enforcement features, insightful reporting, and optional e-commerce capabilities, Kivuto Cloud is built for the complexities of managing licenses and entitlements in higher education.
The Result
The Software Licensing Team faced a difficult balancing act in their goal to limit costs while improving efficiencies. Here’s how Kivuto Cloud helped them overcome these challenges.
- Cost Recovery
Kivuto Cloud’s e-commerce capabilities enabled the Software Licensing Team to start recouping costs immediately. By charging students and faculty for access to digital resources, they were able to fulfil their mandate to remain cost-neutral for the institution by recovering the purchase costs of those licenses. For many products, the price per license was also lower than it would have if the institution had procured the products on their own. - Efficiency Through Automation
Manually fulfilling the many software orders placed each semester used to be a major burden on the Software Licensing Team. By automating the processing of payments and the delivery of licenses and entitlements, Kivuto Cloud eliminated the need for all this manual, behind-the-scenes work. - Instant Digital Delivery
The manual means by which digital resources used to be distributed at the institution caused long waits for students and faculty to receive their software. Now, with Kivuto Cloud, all software is delivered digitally via secure download. In addition to making the Software Licensing Team’s job easier, this has reduced wait times for software from over a month in some cases to just minutes or seconds.
Today students and faculty can self-serve access to the software they need and be ready to use it within minutes. The Software Licensing Team no longer has to manually fulfil orders and process payments, as Kivuto Cloud has automated all of those processes. Cost recovery has made it easier for the team to remain cost-neutral, and improved efficiencies have allowed the school to optimize costs even further by reallocating valuable IT resources.
About Kivuto
For over 20 years, Kivuto has transformed the way academic software is delivered. Today, Kivuto streamlines the management and delivery of academic digital resources through Kivuto Cloud – a secure and centralized platform for schools to offer any type of digital resource to their students, faculty, and staff.
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