cSubs
Bringing Visibility into Contract Management Processes

Sitting in a conference room, Kenneth S. Redler, CTO of cSubs carries out an initial assessment of a customer’s spend. After deliberating on the client’s general ledger and spend areas, Redler asks a simple but important question: “How much are you spending currently on your license content and contracts?” “12 to 15 million dollars”—comes the answer. It did not take long for the team at cSubs to figure out the error part of the ‘client’s spend.’ cSubs assisted them in collating all their spend information into one unified system to bring visibility into their license content and contract management processes. The outcome was a staggering three million in savings for the client.

This is not the case with a single company. Optimizing and streamlining the procurement contracts—that involve multiple locations, users, and geographies—has become increasingly complex today. The rising stature of procurement has resulted in the augmentation of procurement’s interface with more systems across an enterprise. Companies need to control and manage the front-line buying and spending decisions by leveraging the synergy of procurement processes with organizational systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Content Management Systems (CMS). With an aim to deliver a central place to manage procurement functions, cSubs provides organizations with the tools for centralized control of electronic content tasks and analytics functions that include pricing, contract documents, access rights, renewals, usage statistics, and terms and conditions.

cSubs takes a different approach to solve the integration challenges of the procurement systems by optimizing specific workflows for their clients. cSubs’ solution also brings ERP integration capabilities with Oracle, SAP, Ariba, and PeopleSoft.

Through their web-based cSubs Connect platform—built specifically for managing subscription-based resources—the firm enables their clients to have a single consolidated payment option for all individual purchases. “It allows the managers to control the catalog and a range of other elements that an end user is exposed to,” says Redler. It also runs reporting analytics to increase the value of the bottom line.

After analyzing the companies’ subscriptions through cSubs Connect, cSubs Clarity manages vendor agreements to provide significant cost reductions in multi-user and enterprise-licensed content. cSub’s services centralize access credentials, licensing, and business intelligence in one convenient dashboard.

We will put our team to work on your behalf, analyzing your entire portfolio to make sure your contracts are right-sized, consolidated and fairly priced

The firm also provides cSubs Subscription Service that allows companies to streamline the process of ordering and renewing journals, magazines, newspapers, memberships, directories, books, and eContent. Users are provided with real-time reports to identify areas for potential cost reduction through cSubs Subscription Service’s state-of-the-art dashboard technology. Besides, cSubs’ Contract Negotiations and International and Domestic Consolidation Services help clients to wrap their corporate subscriptions into one source to save money, reduce claims, and improve delivery. Through their knowledgeable and experienced negotiators, cSubs ensures that their clients obtain favorable terms with new contracts and renewals. “We will put our team to work on your behalf, analyzing your entire portfolio to make sure your contracts are right-sized, consolidated, volume-leveraged and fairly priced,” adds Redler.

According to Redler, the recent trend in the contract management landscape indicates substantial growth opportunities outside the U.S. Recognizing the trend, cSubs is geared up to extend their services to non-U.S. clients. The firm also plans to extend their solution portfolio to the cloud in order to keep pace with the existing trend. “Mergers and acquisitions has become a common process now, and there have been many instances where the non-U.S. companies required our unifying expertise as they acquire a firm which has a separate IT department,” informs Redler. By helping clients tackle challenges like this, “We aim to grow rapidly in the next couple of years,” Redler signs off.