Due to the current licensing solution coming an end of life state and the need for a more modern approach to software licensing, a project was initiated to move from a one time license to a software as a service solution. Even though this did have an impact for the external customers, it also had far reaching consequences for the internal business processes and systems. My role was to identify the requirements from the different business units as well as provide a design for the internal sales process in the CRM system used by the sales force and administration.
Example of actions in the project…
Requirements gathering
Purpose: Figure out how to deal with, e.g., when to start billing for a license as well as what the sales and delivery process looked like for the different sales offices
Methods: Interviewing stakeholders from the different sales offices and administration as well as organizing workshops with relevant people
Outcome:
An agreement between all sales offices about start date and billing was achieved. This had been a challenge as countries have different rules when it comes to sales of software.
Possibility to define the licenses directly in the CRM-system used by the sales force. This reduced the work load for the administration staff compared to the previous solution.
A single point of truth for license data. By selecting to keep the data in only one place and fetching it on demand from other systems involved in the sales process, the risk of mismatches was greatly reduced.
Working and seamless integration between all systems used from sales to customer delivery. Since a sale could include both hardware and software, it was important to be able to provide the customer with the license information both in electronic as well as physical form delivered with the other goods sold. Hence, a process that worked for all systems as well as people involved had to be developed and implemented.