Use this article to understand how Savings Recommendations help teams capture, prioritize, and track optimization opportunities from idea to realized impact.
Track savings opportunities from idea to impact
Recommendations help teams capture, manage, and track cost optimization opportunities across technology assets.
Each recommendation represents a potential action that could reduce cost, improve efficiency, or support better spend management. Recommendations can be created manually or sourced from cloud optimization inputs such as AWS or Azure.
Yarken helps teams track both potential savings and realized savings, so optimization work does not stop at identifying the opportunity. Teams can monitor progress, understand expected value, and measure the financial impact once action is taken.
What you can do
-
Create recommendations for different asset types.
-
Capture cost optimization opportunities across cloud and non cloud assets.
-
Add recommendations manually or through template-based upload.
-
Track the source of each recommendation, such as manual, AWS, or Azure.
-
Assign recommendations to specific assets using asset type and asset code.
-
Categorize recommendations by type, such as cloud optimization.
-
Track recommendation status from new to in progress, completed, or dismissed.
-
Assign complexity and value levels.
-
Enter potential savings and realized savings.
-
Review recommendation performance in dashboards and reports.
How teams use Recommendations
Teams use Recommendations to manage optimization work in a structured way.
A recommendation starts as a savings opportunity. It may come from a manual review, cloud optimization input, asset analysis, vendor review, or another source.
Once created, the recommendation can be tracked by asset, category, source, complexity, value, status, potential savings, and realized savings.
This helps teams prioritize which opportunities to act on, monitor progress, and measure whether completed actions delivered the expected financial benefit.
Potential and realized savings
Recommendations support two savings views.
Potential savings represent the expected value of the recommendation.
Realized savings represent the actual savings achieved after the recommended action is taken.
Tracking both helps teams understand the difference between opportunity value and delivered impact. This is important for FinOps, IT finance, and optimization programs where teams need to show measurable outcomes.
Recommendation status
Each recommendation can be tracked by status.
New recommendations represent opportunities that have been identified but not yet acted on.
In progress recommendations are being reviewed or implemented.
Completed recommendations have been acted on.
Dismissed recommendations are not being pursued.
This gives teams a simple way to manage the lifecycle of optimization work.
Dashboards and reporting
Recommendations can be analyzed through the Recommendation Overview dashboard under Reports and Cost Transparency.
Teams can review recommendations by month, asset type, and source. Potential and realized savings can also appear in tiles on asset and cloud-related dashboards where available.
This gives leaders and operators a clearer view of expected savings, achieved savings, and progress over time.
What makes it different
Recommendations help Yarken connect optimization ideas to measurable financial outcomes.
Many teams identify savings opportunities, but lose track of what was accepted, rejected, completed, or actually realized. Recommendations create a structured record of the opportunity, expected value, action status, and actual savings.
This helps FinOps, IT, Finance, and asset owners manage optimization as an operating process, not a one-time analysis.
When to use Recommendations
Use Recommendations when teams need to capture, prioritize, and track cost optimization opportunities.
Use them for cloud optimization, asset optimization, vendor review, application rationalization, infrastructure review, or any area where potential savings should be measured against realized savings.
For detailed step by step instructions on creating recommendations, uploading recommendation templates, managing recommendation fields, updating statuses, and reviewing recommendation dashboards, refer to the relevant user guides.
Next step
Related articles