Onboarded in 14 days and 5x ROI

The Challenge

‍FirstVet has expanded rapidly since 2016, and now operates in seven markets across Europe and North America. It also offers a service that never stops – 24/7, 365 days a year. As it has grown, and to provide the “always-available” offering, the company has had to onboard lots of tech to help support this. 

This created some significant challenges. FirstVet’s cross-continent growth decentralized the procurement of much of its software, and the company subsequently lost visibility over the contents of its tech stack. In addition to this, the team occasionally used regional suppliers but had limited oversight on this aspect, making it difficult to tell which region was using which software application at any one time.

Renewals had also usually been automatic, and so opportunities for savings were often missed. Only at annual reviews had superfluous / financially overweighted tech been identified.

This was not only costing FirstVet more than it should have been, but was proving to be a significant time and effort drain, especially for the finance team. 

The Solution 

To solve these challenges, FirstVet wanted:

• Improved visibility over its tech stack
• Significant cost savings
• Knowledge of benchmarking for pricing confidence
• Time savings for the finance team

After reaching out to Vertice, the team agreed that the following criteria must be met to meet these challenges – reduce SaaS spend, limit the time and effort required to purchase and renew software, and implement a single source of truth for software costs and utilization management. 

FirstVet, like many companies spending on SaaS, wanted to save as much as possible. The finance team in particular wanted to set a goal of reducing their total SaaS spend by at least $90,000. 

Whilst FirstVet spent minimal time purchasing and renewing its software (many products were auto-renewed), the team realized that trying to do this themselves would take far more time and effort than was available. The company was keen to commit to focusing more on purchases and renewals, but not fall into a time investment spiral.

Implementing a single source of truth for SaaS spend was not only a criteria, but also a solution. It would enable FirstVet to regain visibility over its software usage and ownership, make better renewal decisions, and have foresight into upcoming renewal periods. Also, legal teams could answer security and compliance requests, such as who their regional suppliers are, and any DPAs.

The Vertice platform was the perfect solution to these criteria. Designed as a single source of truth for SaaS management and utilization, it would perfectly fit one of FirstVet’s requirements. This in turn would provide the data and visibility needed to not only identify opportunities for significant cost savings, but also take the burden of renewal management away from the finance team – keeping time and effort allocation for these projects to a minimum.

The Results  

With the Vertice platform onboarded within two weeks, FirstVet was quickly able to start achieving its goals and beyond.

With full visibility into their SaaS stack provided in one place by the Vertice platform, the team were able to establish better financial control over their purchases and renewals. FirstVet regained the cost of Vertice within six months and going on to achieve a 500% ROI on the Vertice platform in the first year.

But pure cost savings were never the singular goal. With full stack visibility and better control over their SaaS products, the finance team were able to be better organized in this area and thus ensure a significant amount of their time was not eaten away.

Entrusting Vertice to handle all commercial negotiations has proven fruitful. Apart from saving goals being met, entrusting Vertice with time consuming projects meant more time for the FirstVet team to focus on its business.