A Wiser Approach to Engineering Software Management

[00:11] Thirawut Suksong: Good morning everyone, and thank you for joining today’s session — I’m honored to be the presenter today.

[00:21] Thirawut Suksong: To save our time, here is my agenda for today: introductions, and then we’ll talk about the changing landscape of engineering software — the trends and impact — then move on to why engineering software management is becoming more challenging today. Then I’ll propose an approach, then a wiser approach enabler, a case study, and then we’ll end with the key takeaways.

[00:57] Thirawut Suksong: My topic is “A Wiser Approach to Engineering Software Management.” Before we talk about that,

[01:05] Thirawut Suksong: I would like to ask you one simple question: do you really know how your engineering software is being used today?

[01:14] Thirawut Suksong: I think this is a big question for your IT team.

[01:20] Thirawut Suksong: You need to manage multiple licenses, multiple vendors — how can you manage it efficiently?

[01:30] Thirawut Suksong: As we understand today, engineering software management is something very important to your work, but the software licenses you have are, I believe, one of the most valuable assets in your company or any organization.

[01:57] Thirawut Suksong: So how can we manage it efficiently? Do we have enough licenses, or is the license we already provide to the engineers used efficiently? When is the highest demand — the peak period — that engineers use the software?

[02:23] Thirawut Suksong: We don’t know that, right? We just know how many licenses we have. We don’t know how they’re actually being used.

[02:34] Thirawut Suksong: So now I’d like you to understand the changing landscape of engineering software.

[02:45] Thirawut Suksong: Let’s look at the business trend and the business impact. What is driving the market you face today?

[02:57] Thirawut Suksong: So here I’ve put a common business trend and business impact we face today: a growing workforce, leading to more users competing for software. What does this mean? When you recruit more engineers as your business grows, you need more engineers, more projects, more licenses.

[03:15] Thirawut Suksong: How can you manage that, because everyone needs to compete to use the license in the organization?

[03:21] Thirawut Suksong: And then the next one: an expanding software portfolio, leading to increased complexity in software management.

[03:30] Thirawut Suksong: That’s for sure — there’s complexity because the software comes from many places, many vendors, and different locations.

[03:39] Thirawut Suksong: And advanced software today gets harder and harder — for example, calculation software is very specialized, and we, as the IT team, don’t always know the functionality, but we need to manage it efficiently to make it available to the user.

[04:13] Thirawut Suksong: So that’s one of the bigger business trends. The next one: distributed engineering teams. What does that mean? I think in a big company, or any company, there are many locations around the world, many locations in Thailand. The problem is: how do you manage the license and distribute it to them? So distributed engineering teams are getting bigger and bigger — there are multiple teams rising up in the company, in many different locations.

[04:52] Thirawut Suksong: That is the business trend, and you need to do something better to manage them.

[05:00] Thirawut Suksong: And the last one: faster product development cycles, leading to greater demand for availability and responsiveness. This is the goal of the business — the value in every company — because as the business grows in the modern world, product development needs to be faster. You need to shorten the cycle time, deliver the product to the consumer very fast. So how can you do that? This is the base you need to adopt — adapt your company to respond to this situation.

[05:41] Thirawut Suksong: So let’s go to why software management is becoming more challenging. This is the kind of challenge everyone faces today.

[05:54] Thirawut Suksong: I’ll start with visibility.

[06:09] Thirawut Suksong: It’s very important, because as I said before, we just know how many licenses we have — maybe we have licenses for some software brands — but do we know if that license is actually being used by a user at that time?

[06:33] Thirawut Suksong: No, right? We don’t know that. So how can we realize the importance of visibility? If you have good, complete visibility of your software, you move from just having assumptions to having a better decision to make in the future — you can predict your business in the future. What is the investment? How can you invest in the future?

[07:08] Thirawut Suksong: The next one — I think this one you face often in your work — license availability is very common. Many engineers try to access and use a license, and what happens if they need the license to do their project, but the license isn’t enough? That’s a problem, so it’s very challenging to manage, because your total licenses can’t just equal the total users at a given time — there’s a period where it may be available, maybe unavailable, so we need to manage it.

[08:05] Thirawut Suksong: The third challenge: increasing complexity. Yes, because I do know that the engineering license, the digital solutions in your company, a lot of it is from one vendor, another one from another vendor, and different locations — so it’s very complex. For example, you have a license manager from one company, another license manager from another vendor — how can you manage it if you don’t have a centralized license manager to manage everything at once, and you don’t have the visibility to synchronize everything at the same time? It’s very complex, and as the business grows, you can’t manage it efficiently.

[08:59] Thirawut Suksong: The last one: planning with uncertainty. Every challenge you face is toward one goal for your company — if you have good visibility, you don’t need to decide anything based on assumption. You can decide based on actual usage, actual data. That is the key point of software management that I’d like to propose in the wiser approach.

[09:40] Thirawut Suksong: And moving on to the approach — this is the approach I would like to propose to everyone, to fully understand engineering software management and how we can manage the license, manage your system, efficiently.

[10:08] Thirawut Suksong: I’d like to share with you the four steps of the approach.

[10:15] Thirawut Suksong: Of course, in your company, in any manufacturing organization, you have a variety of engineering software — CAD, CAM, part simulation, manufacturing solutions, analytics, and so on — lots of things in your company. So the first step is visibility.

[10:46] Thirawut Suksong: If you have complete visibility, you can have actionable insight, because visibility can generate actionable insight. If you have actionable insight, it can enable optimization, and optimization will deliver value to your company.

[11:11] Thirawut Suksong: Okay, let’s start with the first one: visibility. As I told you, if you just know the quantity — the number of licenses — but you don’t know how engineers use it, it’s not enough; you can only do reactive activity. But I want to turn that reactive activity into proactive activity — that’s the goal I think everyone needs to work toward. If you have good visibility — for example, if you see on the screen on the left-hand side, the real-time visibility console — you can know who is active and which application is being used, and when is the peak time, and what is the demand of usage. This is the usage data you can have if you have complete visibility.

[12:33] Thirawut Suksong: Now you have visibility, so the next one is to generate actionable insight. I’d call it actionable insight, not just insight, because this insight is more practical, more real — real enough that you can act on it for your work. The actionable insight, once you have visibility, tells you what’s going on, but with actionable insight you can know why — why the license isn’t enough, why this time is a peak period, why this time is very busy. So you try to analyze the license management in your company — that’s your job, your mission — and then the actionable insight will enable optimization.

[13:41] Thirawut Suksong: This is the time you bring actionable insight to become an improvement in your company — you need to improve it. We have the data — visibility — we know the reason why, and we can analyze it as a number, as an insight, and now we need to do something to improve your license management and system management. Maybe in your company you establish a brand-new policy to automate license management — I don’t know what policy, what system you’ll try to improve in your company — it’s just a concept, that once you have the insight, you improve it.

[14:49] Thirawut Suksong: So if you look at the screen — with the manager planning portal, then the wiser dashboard strategy, that’s visibility and actionable insight — you can optimize to get better license allocation. Now you know if a license is checked out, picked up by someone, and they just pick it up and do nothing — just leave it idle all day, 24 hours — while someone else needs to use that license but can’t. This is the time you can optimize it — you can check the license back in, if you have the tools to manage license allocation. So I think you can improve your engineering software management.

[16:03] Thirawut Suksong: Okay, so let’s come to the last one: business value. This is what everyone cares about — the business value. Everything we try to do, how does it turn into value for your company? What is the business gain, the business value for your company? I think every company has different policies and different targets, but if you have visibility, actionable insight, and optimization, you can make better decisions toward your business goal in the future. If next year you want to plan, now you have the insight of how much budget you need to set, or you can know that a license is unnecessary — not needed — so you don’t need to purchase it, you can get rid of it. So this is the business value, in different terms, different perspectives, that you can improve in your company.

[17:20] Thirawut Suksong: However, all of this is just the concept I want to share with you. But if you want your company to achieve this, you need to have a wiser approach enabler.

[17:44] Thirawut Suksong: Okay, let’s see what enables a wiser approach. You have the concept of the approach, but you need something to enable it — I don’t want to just say it’s Open iT, but yes, this is it — but any platform or tool you have, I’d place it on layer number two, under engineering software, because the software you have needs to be managed effectively. So the enabler I’d like to propose, I call it software usage intelligence, or in short, software intelligence.

[18:41] Thirawut Suksong: So if you have software intelligence, you can have visibility, actionable insight, optimization, and then business value, as I presented before. So this is it, and the company needs to have the ability to do the kind of approach I propose.

[19:10] Thirawut Suksong: So the capabilities of the platform or tool you need — to monitor, to analyze, to optimize, and to plan the business — are very essential to your innovation, very critical to your product development, because everything turns into your business in the future.

[19:43] Thirawut Suksong: Now, the case study — just a simple one I’d like to propose, because we’ll have another session to talk about case studies — but I’ll bring up one of the famous case studies, from a company named Avio Aero.

[20:09] Thirawut Suksong: They faced the same challenges I presented: limited visibility, licenses that couldn’t be managed when users needed them at peak time, and many locations working across the country and across locations, but couldn’t allocate more properly, more efficiently.

[20:40] Thirawut Suksong: So everything they faced, they accepted and adopted — they transformed the data they had into business value by adopting software management, or the software intelligence I’ve been telling you about.

[21:00] Thirawut Suksong: So this is good, because I think this is one of the case studies you can follow — you can read more, study more, on Open iT’s website.

[21:17] Thirawut Suksong: Okay, now I think it’s time to wrap up — thank you very much. I’d like to leave the key takeaway with everyone.

[21:34] Thirawut Suksong: Just one word from me:

[21:37] Thirawut Suksong: You can’t optimize what you can’t see, right? It’s very simple — you have data, but if you can’t manage it, what’s the point?

[21:56] Thirawut Suksong: Thank you very much for listening, and if you have questions, please scan and send your question to me — I’ll answer you.

[22:08] Thirawut Suksong: Thank you. Thank you.