How to Optimize Global Collaboration with SOLIDWORKS PLM

With access to the full suite of apps on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, SOLIDWORKS users can now share in a single source of truth throughout their organization to empower global collaboration. But for you to do this most efficiently and cost-effectively, we’d like to share a few key insights regarding operational processes and license consolidation.

Cutting Costs with Consolidation

Are You Overpaying and Underutilizing Your Global SOLIDWORKS Licenses?

We frequently find global organizations are applying their licenses inefficiently. This often continues unchecked in enterprises growing through acquisitions and mergers where historical processes remain unchallenged. In many cases, this will continue for years at a time. But license consolidation is a viable option for many of these organizations.

By taking stock of user activity and performance, you can begin to understand where, when and which licenses are being used. Shared licenses may cost more, but the work hours you’ll get out of them mean that they’ll pay for themselves in little to no time at all.

Ongoing assessment and management of your active licenses can help you to maintain cost and working efficiency. Here are a few key points to remember when conducting your assessment:

• Maintain an accurate record of license usage based on self-reporting
• Continue to record license allocation/reallocation and access rights
• Stay agile when considering role-based access permissions
• Monitor and manage license servers across time zones
• Identify costs and benefits of on-premise and cloud options
• Identify and manage underutilized licenses

Now, working closely with an experienced and trusted advisor, you can begin to plan a way forward by centralizing global processes.

Centralizing Global Processes

With our initial license analysis complete, we can start an ongoing assessment of user metrics to help optimize your license structure. Along the way we’ll assess your global process structure and fine tune it according to the growth plan of your organization. We suggest conducting an internal assessment of the true value for your organization as you optimize global collaboration.

Ask whether your organization can choose between regionalization and centralization. Are there essential arguments for and against globalizing specific processes? Does centralization present a tangible, significant value for your organization? Will centralization provide, for instance, a new market opportunity? And will the overall change process be manageable?

In Our Experience…

Organizations entering into a global, platform way of thinking can be held back by legacy processes and license structures. To effectively manage such a dramatic series of change processes, you have to ensure tiered on-boarding throughout the organization.

Make sure that the benefits are seen and understood from C-Suite to End Users. Then you can begin to plan your roadmap. Doing so with the aid of an experienced and trusted advisor means that you and your teams can draw on a wealth of knowledge from industry peers and Product Lifecycle Management experts.

If you’re considering a global platform approach to your design engineering and manufacture, then make sure you tune into our SOLIDWORKS webinar series. Discover new perspectives from expert SOLIDWORKS users, PLM Project Managers and more.