Panalpina IT team wins coveted European award

Monday saw double delight for Panalpina’s IT strategy and planning department after the team took first prize in the coveted SAMS Europe Awards 2018 in Berlin, Germany. SAMS, an acronym for Software Asset Management Strategies, is an annual event that honors outstanding projects in the field of software asset and software license management.

“We are absolutely delighted to win this award,” said Christian Cornelius, corporate IT software asset manager, after what was a mammoth, but really important, project for us.”

The project the IT strategy and planning team undertook was indeed huge, as Cornelius explains: “A large part of my job is to keep Panalpina compliant in terms of software licenses, and we wanted to ensure that we were compliant with our SAP license.

“To do this meant we had to go through customer contracts from the past 20 years, most of which weren’t digitized.”

Cornelius and his team did this, entering the SAP licenses for every contract for the last 20 years into a single spreadsheet. This then allowed them to accurately see how many licenses were available.

By implementing a third party tool (Snow Optimizer for SAP), they were able to get accurate usage information on all SAP licenses in the Panalpina environment and compare the usage with the existing licenses in the spreadsheet.

“We realized that we were paying for too many licenses, and so we opened negotiations with SAP. While those negotiations were long, we are now in a much stronger position than we were at the outset of the project, and have essentially moved from an operational license management model to a strategic software asset management model.” The hard work and renegotiations resulted in a significant cost reduction for Panalpina.

Cornelius was also keen to point out that with Snow License Manager, a license management tool already in use since 2012, Panalpina can continually monitor non-SAP software on all Panalpina devices. “Having this level of transparency, and being able to see instantly which devices are using which software is vital for us, because it makes software compliance audits so much easier.”

This is the second award the team has received for this nine-month project after Cornelius picked up a Snow Hero 2017 award earlier in the year.