Business getting affected by COVID19
Chances are high that you are reading this during a break you took from your office work, which you are doing from a desk in your living room, in your house. You have been working on assignments, having online meetings and even giving presentations to team members – all the while sitting at the same desk!
A large portion of the working population across the globe has been displaced from office cubicles, conference rooms and even shop floors and are working remotely, from their home (with very few exceptions like pharmacists, doctors and other emergency service providers) due to the global pandemic caused by the Novel Coronavirus. Historically business has not fared well in the face of pandemics – the 1918 influenza pandemic, also called the Spanish flu, had a devastating impact on the businesses across the US and Europe. It is estimated that the current and accrued losses with regards to the Corona virus incident has already crossed a trillion USD globally.
How businesses will react
But, as they say, the show must go on. Some of us are finding the change challenging, and several organisations have come forward with tools and solutions for collaboration across geographies.
With time, however, organisations will start looking at their balance sheets with more scrutiny. It is expected that revenue growth across the next few months might be sluggish across industries. The leadership and the top management of engineering and other manufacturing firms will have to evaluate their existing infrastructure and make it leaner, if possible.
Designing, automation and other software account for a big part of the expenses for an engineering company. An IT Asset manager can save the organization a lot of money by stopping the purchase of unnecessary software. Apart from discovering “shelf” (unused) software and finding the equilibrium between the number of users and the pool of licenses, he can achieve additional savings by validating that there is no need to acquire additional licenses for a new project.
It is time to stretch software licenses to the fullest
As users, we are often guilty of “hogging” software – it is much easier to check out a license and hold on to it all day, whether we are using it or not, at the same time possibly depriving other users access because there are no free licenses. While this is indeed an inconvenience in the normal world, in times of crisis it is cardinal.
Asset managers can intervene, by saving and closing the software hoarder’s work and putting the license back into the pool. Harvesting licenses this way is very effective and improves productivity. However, license harvesting cannot be implemented as a manual process, which is where license management software, like OpenLM, comes in, supporting an automated approach to harvesting based on the company’s software policy.
A detailed reporting structure, provided by a license management software like OpenLM, also helps an organization with exact numbers during renewals. The management gets clarity as figures pertaining to usage, peak demand and eventually how many licenses are actually needed, are arrived at.
ROI of a monitoring system for Engineering Licensing
We, at OpenLM, firmly believe that this is the right time to invest in a system which monitors your engineering licenses effectively. Engineering licences are expensive. OpenLM’s robust reporting and monitoring mechanism pays for itself the moment one such license is eliminated from the pool. Of over a thousand clients using OpenLM, a majority have ended up saving more than 15% in their first year itself of using OpenLM, with year-on-year savings through optimizing their software portfolio. For a detailed analysis of how OpenLM is a must have as far as your ROI on license management is concerned, please use our ROI calculator and learn more about OpenLM for Engineering Licensing on our website.
Is it possible for an application like OpenLM to monitor licenses when the uses are working remotely, or are ‘working from home’? The answer is yes! For accessing a full featured 30 day trial version of OpenLM visit us here.
