CAD license management practice

[Guest renonevada]

Scenario 1: When a user grabs two or more licenses of the same software.

 

Scenario 2: When a user opens multiple functional modules at the same time.

 

Scenario 3: When a user occupies licenses and never recycle them.

 

Scenario 4: When users get licenses from stand-alone hosts.

 

 

 

Being a CAD manager at one of the largest auto manufacturers in the world, I wanted to share my experience with you regarding CAD license management.

 

During the beginning stage right after I joined the firm, I started to look into the baseline and found out that it was just a chaos.

 

I started to doubt whether there're sufficient number of licenses to use, however, it's 85/102, 85 licenses and 102 engineers in that facility, meaning 17 engineers wouldn't be able to get licenses while all other 85 engineers working on their jobs at the same time. Nonetheless, that's not the root cause for this chaos, because there's no such time when all engineers get to work on Catia. So, why?

 

After days of search on the internet, I found and downloaded a software named "LMT LicManager" recommended by my friend from Magna( he said this software worked well for them). It's interesting that, the real issue identified was, according to the historical license usage information generated by LMT LicManager: a big number of engineers had taken licenses for so long time and just never take them back to license pool, even there's an user took license for 34 days, wow! I was shocked.

 

I would say the software works perfectly, I just love it. It also helps me to view license usage in real time, it automatically recycles overtime licenses( I set overtime as 20 mins, if mouse an monitor are both remained unmovable within 20 mins, the software will automatically take license back), but most relevant feature is, it gives me a forecast for next year's license procurement, 63 was the number it calculated, which means the peak value(only 63 licenses used in previous year's busiest day). We could cut down 85-63=22 license costs. Useful!

 

Now, there're a couple of other features of LMT LicManager that I am trying to discover in near feature.

 

As a manager, I believe the advance of computing technology will benefit our daily managment whole a lot, at least, I will keep an eye on finding many more solid tools.