How to use Autodesk Flex more efficiently with CQFlexMon

What true flexibility means

Flexibility with licence payments brings an opportunity to get tighter in your finances than ever before. It means you can match the tools your team needs to their real-time requirements—that time in the week, or that moment in the project—rather than having applications sitting there open and used. Like a dripping tap, if the water flows you pay for it whether you used it or not. Flexibility enables you to turn the tap on when you need to and turn it off when you don’t need any water.

All you have to do is plan for when you need to turn the tap on or rather, on a drier note, plan for when the software will be used. Once you plan effectively, the need for constant policing is removed. It can be automated, but automation is only effective if you set the ground rules.

For efficient, stress-free, licensing management: start here

With the introduction of Autodesk Flex tokens, enabling you to “pay as you go for occasional product use”, there is a real opportunity for companies to save money by examining their approach to user-assigned licenses. Known simply as ‘Flex’, this payment option covers an enormous range of Autodesk products you can explore here.

While there are still many customers working with the Network Licencing model (multi-user subscriptions). The move to User-Assigned (Named User) licenses is here. This change came fully into play on February 2023. I outlined the impact it may have on your business in a recent blog: ‘How does the move from Network Licenses to Named User Licenses affect me?’

Autodesk Flex brings a whole new set of considerations into the mix regarding your efficient managing of licensing.

Do you really want to be checking every user, every day, to ascertain software usage patterns? Conversely, do you want to let things settle into their own pace and then have the suspicion that perhaps you’re over-paying for software usage?

The very point of any software is that it removes the tedium and complexity of repetitive tasks. This point is lost if the same software forces you into a policing role around your teams; and the bigger the team, the more effort you will have to put in to make sure that the software you’ve invested in is actually bringing a decent return on investment.

What CQFlexMon’s ‘Manage Autodesk’ module does to help you plan, run, and benefit from Autodesk Flex

Symetri have developed a software feature within CQFlexMon (our proprietary software licence monitoring tool) that enables you to gain full and ongoing visibility of how the value your software brings—to your projects, workflows, and business—is the best it can be:

• See who’s using what
  Overview of users and their assigned licenses.
• Drill down to details
  Detailed information of user name, usage, hours per day and any Active Directory information (e.g., country, department)
• Eliminate avoidable costs
  Utilisation and Autodesk Flex token consumption per user and product

Two steps to better licence and token management

As I mentioned, using Autodesk Flex does involve you setting your own ground rules as to how you intend to use the tokens. The way that payment works is that you pre-purchase tokens and then consume as you go.

The CQFlexMon Manage Autodesk module provides two fundamental steps:

Step 1: Data Collection and Usage Analysis
Symetri evaluates your usage of all Autodesk applications to provide a detailed report assessing usage against your licensing arrangement. Included in this foundational (and then rolling) report—which will also inform decisions around the User-Assigned licenses —are details on:

• Unused licenses: Where users have left your company but still have assigned licenses; also, where there has been no usage of the licence in the period involved
• Licensed user candidates: Where users on Autodesk Flex consumes high token volumes and may best be served with full User-Assigned licenses
• Wasted investment: Where users are largely inactive but have Single-User Subscriptions so may be better served using Flex tokens
• Duplications: Where users have been assigned Flex tokens and a Single User Subscription. We make it easily identifiable this is in place. Flex tokens do not get consumed if this is the case.

Step 2: Keeping track
Things change constantly. For example, as people leave, others arrive. CQFlexMon enables you to spot the inactive licenses thereby enabling you to transfer licenses between lapsed users and starters. Keeping track is an obvious requirement but it’s not so obvious how to do it. In a small company this is not a major issue but for the bigger organisation it can be an extremely challenging task.

If you have pre-purchased a large amount of token’s it can be easy to lose the thread as to who is using what and when. People may have started off as obvious candidates for token use, but then become busier and busier; still using tokens.

Behaviours such as this go against the need of flex tokens. Our report will highlight such anomalies, enabling you to rectify them. Other users may simply have forgotten what their usage is and how it is facilitated.

Through regular reporting on your usage status across all team members and locations, CQFlexMon Manage Autodesk makes it easy to work your licensing model in direct response to proven and anticipated software usage.

Ongoing benefits of CQFlexMon Manage Autodesk

• Validate your decisions
  Differing Autodesk products consume a different amount of tokens per 24 hour period, token amounts per software can be seen here Token Amounts although you can open and close the software any amount of times within the 24 hour period. At the start of a 24-hour block of usage you have five minutes grace to make sure you want to proceed.
  
  This is where a note of caution is applicable. Tactical software consumption can run away with itself if not closely monitored and suddenly be performing the role of a more strategic licensing choice. For example, if a user accesses software through a Flex token arrangement between 7 and 10 times in a month—say around 100 times a year—it would be more appropriate to pay for a user-assigned licence.
  
  
• Pay smarter
  The trick is to deeply understand your software usage, by time, by user. CQFlexMon performs this function with Manage Autodesk. The current situation, with the residual usage of multi-user licenses, prior to user-assigned, illustrates the point. Imagine if you had 50 multi-user licenses. These could serve the needs of 75 team members, but the shift to user-assigned means that 50 licences would serve a corresponding 50 users.
  
  In such a situation, you may not suddenly need 75 licenses; in fact, with analysis of usage, you may find that you only need 30. This would be decided by assessing and analysing usage patterns and discovering that only 30 people on your team were day-to-day heavy users, and the rest were sporadic, or infrequent, users. This would enable you to reduce the actual numbers of User-Assigned licenses needed and fill in the rest of the anticipated consumption with Autodesk Flex tokens.
  
  
• Improve your return on investment
  The shifting shape of Autodesk licensing over the past few years has been confusing to many. It’s a complication that comes along with many of the world’s leading software applications.

When it comes to Autodesk products and how to best fund your usage of them, CQFlexMon helps you make sure you make the right choices.

• Why should I consider software license monitoring?
• How does CQFlexMon help us keep compliant with software licences?
• How does the move from Network licenses to named user licenses affect me?
• Exploring Symetri’s software licence monitoring – CQFlexMon’s modules
• FAQ’s about monitoring software usage with CQFlexMon

If you want to discuss your choices, and how to make them smarter, please get in touch with us at info@symetri.co.uk.