Corporate Evolution at the Division Level

Why do engineering teams use different engineering licenses?

There are any number of different ways teams and divisions are structured. But in this example, I will use R&D teams dedicated to product lines. Each Product division had the autonomy to make the decisions on which software they could purchase.

• The Product 1 team has been running since the 80’s and PTC Pro Engineer was the first tool to deliver parametric modelling.
• Product 2 came along later, but was for Aerospace, somewhere where Catia was dominant, so the Director made the decision to buy Catia.
• When Product 3 was launched, it needed to be developed in a really short time, the director knew there was a lot of cheap Inventor engineers available on the resourcing market so went with Inventor.

Manufacturing only thought they needed 2D, so just had AutoCAD. The  Sub contractors were using Siemens NX.

At some point a leader thought about this and considered the consequences, Engineers would need training on the other CAD packages if they needed to move between departments.

They wanted to consolidate standard parts across the products, but data was in different and incompatible CAD formats. But ultimately, having 100’s of different software vendor licenses meant they were being inefficient with user ratios – they had many licenses they were not using.

This is where LAMUM comes in. We have helped many companies over the years centralize and bring more visibility and transparency to their engineering licenses.

Mergers & Acquisitions

M&A can often bring together companies using different software vendors. One of the benefits of M&A is the economies of scale, therefore the leadership will be keen to consolidate on a single tool as soon as possible. This will allow engineers to work across projects.

More licenses purchased as the Leadership panics on reports of license denials.

I once had the Chief Engineering bang on my desk and demand we buy more licenses as his team were getting license denials. I was able to show him the data, in that we only had 60% utilization during most of the days. But when he finished his Engineering review and demanded all the engineers get back to work, it blew the license ratio’s we worked to. He was able to stagger when engineers were needed on the system and all was good. Others are not so lucky.

Changing license models – Engineering

With each change, the cost of ownership increases. License models are designed to create confusion. Many companies have a mixture of perpetual, subscription and token based.

Change of Personnel or Outsourcing

I often see situations where a key admin has left the company and the managers have no idea about the license estate or how to monitor it.  Equally, management decide to outsource the IT Support function but didn’t consider the management of licenses to be a critical part of the contract.