In recent years there has been a noticeable interest in implementing a chargeback system, due to the advantages it brings: increased transparency of IT costs and license usage, which works in tandem with improved financial management.

The chargeback system drives efficiency. Instead of having a centralized budget for licenses, organizations can opt to allocate license utilization costs to the business unit that consumes them. But what happens when you have thousands of projects? Can you measure license utilization based on projects? Of course. 

With OpenLM, you can see how a project is consuming your resources such as licenses and end-user working hours spent on the specific project. Will explain below how. 

How to measure license usage per project – the OpenLM way

1) Install a lightweight messenger on end users’ workstations

The OpenLM solution was built to provide organizations with the proper toolset to effectively measure resource usage. To shed light on the actual license utilization of the end users and obtain an accurate measurement of the actual usage of all the licenses allocated to a specific project, all you need to do is install a lightweight application on end users’ workstations. This piece of software, called the OpenLM Agent, will be your messenger: it reports actual software usage to OpenLM Cloud (or OpenLM Server for the on-prem version), so by the end of the day, you can analyze the data using the easy-to-understand reports you can generate via EasyAdmin.

2) Notify the end user to select a project

The latest version of the OpenLM Agent will also remind the end user to select a project upon launching the monitored application, so you can allocate the license utilization to that specific project.

To achieve this, we analyzed all the options we have to inform the end user that he or she needs to select a project from a (long) list, so OpenLM can report the license usage accordingly. We thought: what is the most common and most frequently used application on a computer nowadays? The Web browser, of course! So, there you have it: we are now delivering our prompts through the most popular Web browsers, so your end user never misses a prompt to select a project using the Personal Dashboard.

If for some reason a user has the browser closed, the OpenLM Agent will open the default Web browser, so the message to your end user finally reaches its destination. This option is not enabled by default. 

3) A user-friendly Web interface

We launched Personal Dashboard to bring more transparency to license usage in an organization. Now, we are expanding its capabilities by offering the option to select the project from a searchable list of projects displayed in the Personal Dashboard. When the end user clicks on the “select project” notification, it will automatically open the Personal Dashboard and show the projects page, so all he or she needs to do is select the project he or she will be working on. By the way, license administrators can adjust the frequency of the browser notifications.

You have thousands of projects? No problem. To find the project you want the end user to allocate license usage to, all you need to do is use the search bar or mark it as a favorite, and you will see it pinned to the top of the list.

+1: More notifications

The OpenLM Agent  will also notify the user 

• when a license was harvested because the application was idling;

• when the application the end user is trying to launch is not allowed to run on the workstation;
• when a license becomes available. 

What insights will you get from OpenLM?

With the OpenLM Agent installed on end users’ workstations, you have the right tool to access the key metric of a well-functioning project chargeback system. By logging into EasyAdmin, you can filter license utilization reports per project to obtain accurate usage info about your software assets per project.

With OpenLM, you will see:

• the exact utilization of the tracked application or all the applications based on that project;
• how much time was spent on that project utilizing license A, B, C, etc.

Are you ready to finally implement the project chargeback system you’ve been dreaming about? Contact OpenLM now!