Kundengeschichte | Umstellung auf die Cloud: Die Bedeutung von Flexibilität in Ihrer Metering-Lösung

[0:05] Linda: Good Morning, Good Afternoon, and Good Evening! Thank you so much for joining us today! My name is Linda Cole, I’m a Business Solutions Consultant at Open iT and I’m happy to be here with Michael Allen. And today we’re talking about Transitioning to the Cloud: The Importance of Agility in your Metering Solution.

[0:27] And live so you know always have a little bit of a tweak. Let me start with the background on Michael. Michael has worked in the Engineering Industry for more than 30 years and he’s been at Burns & McDonnell for the last 24. Currently, Michael is the Director of Engineering Technology and currently manages over 30 million dollars of investments in Engineering Technology and is responsible for maximizing the value gained and minimizing overhead.

[0:54] His team manages more than 200 software vendors across all disciplines of engineering including strategic vendors like Autodesk, Aspen Technologies, Bentley, ESRI, and Hexagon his recent efforts are focused on modernizing the engineering experience by promoting the use of cloud-hosted systems and SaaS solutions. These strategies have helped Burns and McDonnell save millions in software licensing infrastructure administration and labor. Michael plans to shift his focus on developing strategies for engineering data management, engineering design automation, and engineering data analytics for reducing risk and predicting project performance. Michael welcome and thank you for joining us today.

[1:39] Michael: Hi, Linda! Thanks for inviting me. We’re happy here and I know that all the folks that are watching this webinar live are interested in you know what Burns & McDonnell has done and how you’ve utilized Open iT. But let’s start with a background on Burns & McDonnell, if you don’t mind.

[1:57] Sure. Burns & McDonnell is an employee-owned company, we’re global EPC firm with over 11,000 workers in May of this year. We plan on bringing onboarding 500 interns so that’ll give you kind of scope of the onboarding that goes on here at Burns & McDonnell.

[2:21] We’re in nearly every state in the United States. We have over 60 US offices, so if you’ve driven down the road and you see a Burns & McDonnell sign, a big ampersand sign, we’re probably your neighbor. So, that’s one of our pride and joys, is we are where the work is.

[2:44] I’m going to touch on a little bit of corporate values. Every company has corporate values right, but I’m only going to for the sake of time, I’m going to touch on the two most important ones. And the first of all is safety. We believe safety is first, it is the most important thing at the end of every day. It doesn’t matter how successful we are as a company, everybody has to go home safe. They have families to go home to and responsibilities outside of work, and we want to make sure that everybody adheres to a culture of safety. The second one I’m going to touch on is we’re all employee owners. I mentioned that you know, we’re an employee-owned company and when I say that I mean we’re employee-owned we’re not like five percent employee-owned and fifty percent owned or ninety-five percent owned by the Board of Directors. We are employee-owned. And it means a big thing to all of us.

[3:38] The culture of being an employee owner changes the way you do work, changes the decisions you make on a day-to-day basis. And it really helps you put stock in what’s important.

[3:51] Linda: I think we saw that Michael throughout your you know our communication with you, throughout the process. So I appreciate you lending that background as well.

[4:00] Michael: I mean that was one of the big drivers for this initiative.

[4:07] Linda: I think we have another slide here to talk about to show you know your worldwide presence as well. But would you mind talking about all the different industries? How diverse Burns & McDonnell is?

[4:17] Michael: So on that previous slide you saw any country that has blue we have a project there. And so we’re doing projects all over the world. In any of the little circles we have offices there. So that means we have a full-time international presence in those countries.

[4:34] And for us, that’s you know, relatively new. When I started 24 years ago, we were US based in Kansas City. We had six regional offices. So we’ve seen a lot of growth in the 24 years that I’ve been here. And you know growth brings with that opportunities, and it also brings licensing challenges. So another driver for our initiative, our key markets,

[5:04] we serve just about every key market from environmental studies to space exploration. Whether it’s power generation and distribution. Which you know, you’re hearing that on the news. All the time right now is, do we have enough power to run our air conditioners all summer long?

[5:20] We have oil and gas chemicals. That’s another big thing you know the price of gas is going up. Gas is on top of everybody’s mind. And we work with all of the key refineries and companies that provide that as a commodity to citizens throughout the world.

[5:40] We’re in healthcare labs, we’re in data centers, we design telecommunication towers, we travel and transportation are big industries for us. And then we do quite a bit of work on the month fed side. So I think the last number I heard was 53 of our work comes from the federal government.

[6:05] So whether it’s an infrastructure bill or something along those lines we’re doing a lot of work in roads and infrastructure and trans you know transmission and distribution. So it all plays into what we do and again goes back to we’re probably your neighbor. We’re probably doing stuff in your community to better the built world.

[6:22] Linda: That’s amazing Michael! So I think you’ve even touched on the span of the projects that you have globally. Plus the markets you know. Can you talk about additional challenges that Burns & McDonnell had when they were looking for a solution to manage their engineering software licenses?

[6:49] Michael: Well we had this idea that it was going to be important to manage these licenses. You know we as we’ve grown over the last 24 years, we’ve seen digits getting added to our contract renewals, and it’s like okay, we’ve got to do something here. These costs are going up and as employee owners we don’t like to look at things as costs, you know. We would rather make investments.

[7:13] And in order to be good investors and how we’re spending our money or how we’re leveraging our money, we got to know a little bit about where it’s going and how we’re using it. So that was one of the challenges that we had. We were coming up, we had several key renewals hitting us on the same year. We had our Bentley renewal, we had our Autodesk renewal, and we had our Hexagon renewal, all hitting us in one year. And it was going to be a significant significant spend. And we, you know basically met with stakeholders throughout the the business units. The industries that we serve, we said, hey what’s important to you and they’re like overhead it’s overhead’s killing us you know, and more like is it really, I’m not sure overhead is killing us but let’s explore that and let’s get in and let’s look at the data.

[8:02] So we started, we had some log files. If you guys have ever worked with like Hexagon Smart License Manager, the old desktop app you could turn logging on and it would create these massive log files and you could hire a data scientist or you could spend a lot of time trying to understand what it was. That you know, a get license and a put license and you know subtracting time codes from one another to try to figure out how many people were using it at a given time. We said okay, this is not scalable for Burns & McDonnell. Burns & McDonnell’s not a software development firm and we’re not going to staff up to the level that we need to in order to interpret, you know, these. Well, the top six to start with but we had, you know, probably two or three hundred apps that we were interested in. So we said let’s start going out.

[8:59] We know we did our best and we have an overhead challenge with Hexagon. And oh by the way, Hexagon is changing their license manager, so this thing that we developed is going to become obsolete in about three months. And we’re not we’re going to be back to ground zero, so we just started exploring

[9:17] you know, we came across the company by the name of Flexera. They work with some of the vendors but they didn’t really have a good reporting and they wanted to stay in the Flexera technology stack. So we went out to a company called ServiceNow we said, hey what do you got? And they had some really great stuff from, you know, if you want to manage desktop applications that are concurrent or perpetual licenses on a per computer basis, that was great. They could do that all day long. But nobody had cracked the shell on how to manage concurrent licensing and named user licensing on the engineering stack. And when they create some hybrids around that is

[10:03] we have these concurrent licenses that get checked out for a little bit and they kind of pseudo become a named user for 24 hours, and then they get checked back in and then somebody else can use them. So nobody had really gotten into this space where the AEC firms play.

[10:19] And that’s the Bentleys and the Autodesks, and no paver software. You know transportation how many people want to know how many seats of paver you have. Well it takes a special company for that, and I think we found three total and I’ve already mentioned one and then another one was a little startup of about six people. And we just like I don’t think they’re scalable enough yet, they’re facing the same challenges that we have, do they have enough development staff to tackle all these applications that we want to track?

[10:55] So we ended up doing shortlists. We had Open iT, ServiceNow, OpenLM, which is real close to Open iT and then Flexera. And we just we stood up pilots, and we said show us what you can do, and what’s your, how broad are you how many applications can you track, how deep are you, how well can you interpret the data that’s coming out of these applications, and how agile are you? Do we have to stand up servers? Do we have to manage and patch software constantly? And you know, that was kind of the criteria that we laid out that we were going to score people on and then we gave them some requirements. You know

[11:44] one of the requirements we didn’t want to stand up infrastructure. We did not want to increase the administration costs to manage licenses so it had to be a service that we were going to subscribe to. It had to come with intellectual knowledge. Do these people know, can they add value to the process? Do they understand the data that they’re surfacing? And can they help us by recommending things that we may not see off the, you know, just at first glance?

[12:18] Like I said, we, you know, they have to be, they had to cover our top six spins. Linda mentioned that earlier the Autodesks, the Bentleys if they couldn’t cover our top six spins, they were kind of already immediately ruled out. And we kind of figured we put our bets out, that you know if you can get the top six, we’re probably going to get a lot more but minimum stakes of the game.

[12:41] You had to do the top six and then we threw in a couple of curveballs. You know the top six of the time was like I mentioned, the smart license manager, desktop application was the current mode of hexagon licensing and they were on the verge of rolling out a whole brand new license model and one of the tests that we had to throw out there was how quickly can you adapt to the new license model and make it work for us?

[13:05] Linda: The new Hexagon ISL is what you’re referring to?

[13:11] Michael: Yeah, the smart licensing, hosted smart licensing. Yep, that was the new thing for that was coming down the pipe that everybody was scrambling to figure out how how do we interpret the data that’s coming out of that system.

[13:22] Linda: So let me ask this, did you have any challenges in implementing the solution? I know a lot of folks are interested in that, or did you have to do any customization to fit, you know, you had a lot of requirements and a lot of things that you needed for Burns & McDonnell. Can you speak to that?

[13:45] Michael: We actually, we had a kind of a comical, first roll out of the desktop app. We went through with our InfoSec team and we said, hey this is what we’re trying to accomplish. We met with Linda and the development team and said, hey this is what we’re doing this is what we’re collecting. We checked all the boxes and got all the permissions from our InfoSec team to roll out this desktop client. And we did, and the very next day, our threat detection software said, hey you’ve got a new executable in the environment that’s tracking stuff. Like yep that’s by design. So we got back with Open iT and we said hey, this is our threat detection software that we’re using. It’s picking you guys up as a threat, you know we’re allowing an exception right now but we need to get past this a little bit of a technical hurdle that we you know inadvertently uncovered. So we got the product development team at Open iT together with the product development team at the threat detection. And they went off on their own. Did some workshops I think, and came back about two days later with a new desktop app and we rolled that out and everybody was happy after that. The threat detection had gotten their requirements to pass them as a known tracking solution and not a threat.

[15:16] They got that built into their end, and Linda and Team got their product updated to be a little less intrusive and less seen as a threat so that was the kind of the funny story of, you know, what challenges always got to be something in a roll-out. There’s always something that was the one. Yeah, so that was the first one.

[15:36] Linda: What about customization? I know a lot of folks think that when you roll out a solution like this, it requires a lot of customization.

[15:49] Michael: So customization is a dirty word in our book, I told you we had a kind of homegrown solution for the smart license manager, the desktop version that was going to become obsolete. And we had two helpers that spent the majority of their time trying to unwind and develop this utilization tool, this in-house utilization tool for one vendor. We said no more, we’re not doing that.

[16:20] There cannot be any customization required by Burns & McDonnell, it has to be an off-the-shelf solution. And if it doesn’t do what we need it to do, we’re going to work with Open iT to create a feature enhancement request so that that knowledge gets back into the product and becomes available as part of the off-the-shelf solution.

[16:47] So we, I think we identified probably five or six things right off the bat with the ISL roll out and things that we needed to enhance or change the way it was collecting or plug in an API to get to the hosted solution. So we started down this path of, you know, how quickly can you guys put these feature enhancements into your sprints and turn around and deliver them. And you guys did an amazing job. It was probably on a weekly basis, we were getting a minor release applied to our hosted solution and that was another thing that we said. You know, no servers patching. It’s got to be a service and it’s got to be managed by Open iT and that was, you know, going into the sprints, going into the feature enhancements that really reinforce that decision up that we had in our original criteria is who better to manage and deploy the software than the team writing it. And that’s exactly how it worked. When we put it into place, I was happy because I didn’t have to spend, you know, after hours time rolling out updates and being on the phone with tech support, I just said okay you guys got it. I’ll see you in the morning and we’ll see how it works.

[18:14] Linda: And I think that that’s a good point Michael. We have, you know, we have some customers that are you know, SaaS based and/or hosted. And we have others that are on-premises, but it is easier especially when you’re you know, you have a lot of changes coming through development. And you’re working with them it’s easier to deploy those when you don’t have to involve the customer and schedule time, etc. So if we can shift, you know, I’m sure everybody’s interested in what kind of results did you get, you know, what challenges were addressed? how did, you know, and I didn’t give the background but because of the shutdown, or whatever. This webinar actually kind of got delayed with everybody focused on their work from home because Burns & McDonnell came on board in 2020. So but if you want to talk about some of the results, either initially or since then, we’d love to hear it.

[19:04] Michael: Yeah, we’ve had really good results. One of the things as an employee-owned company, was the transparency. You know, we needed to be transparent to our users. What we didn’t know when we started this was that we were going to go full on into a pandemic and people were going to be working from home and the self-service portal that was part of the Open iT solution where people could just go log in and and pick a product and see who has the licenses and see what that utilization was to pull up the heat map of, you know, when is it getting used because

[19:42] I don’t know if you know this, but you know when we went to work from home everybody’s schedules changed because they had kids going to school, dogs needing to be let out, everybody’s schedule change. So the heatmaps played a key role in showing people when software available was available and when it was peaking and because of change schedules, we saw some of the US market, you know, shifted to work in the evenings. Well that’s the same time where we’re bringing on our India folks right. So now we have folks in India who are competing with moms and dads who are working evenings to adjust their schedules. And we’re seeing that, you know, what used to work from a global standpoint isn’t working now, and why is that? And we saw, you know, things with the heat map as that the hot spots of the day change to different times of the day.

[20:38] We also saw the opportunity to make better business decisions. We had, you know, the idea that we could, you know, normalize and get rid of like five out of six structural design softwares was kind of a lofty idea on my part. What I didn’t see was how the business would take the data and change the way they bid work and and what kind of projects they would go after.

[21:06] I’ll give you a great example we had. We had this software that was designed to do economic studies in the energy market, it was an expensive software. We were spending about eighty-five thousand dollars a year on this one particular software and we only had two seats of it. And we knew who had those two seats because we could get that from a software inventory right? But we didn’t know how they were using it. We didn’t know how often they used it. We didn’t know if they were trying to use it on the same day. We just knew that we had two users who knew how to do these studies and run the software, and we had two seats of the software that we paid for every year.

[21:51] So one of the first things that we did about three months into it, we took, this is pass our go live. We took the data that we had from the pilot which was about three months worth of data plus the three months of data from the go live and we went back to the two users who said, hey is this software necessary? And their initial response was yes. Business-critical we have to have it like well we have two seats of it and this guy in Houston is using it you know, in January and this guy in St. Louis is using it in May is it possible that you guys could share one license and make it a concurrent license and share it. And then we’re like where’d you get that data? We’re like, well the Open iT rollout that we did three months ago. And they were like well you’re going to show me that data. So we sat down with them, we sat down with their business leaders and said, hey here’s the way you’re using the software. We see when you open it up you’ve we can guarantee you’ve done about a week’s worth of work, in the year so far, the question is, can you guys share a license, and can we make it concurrent and

[23:03] out of the out of the field the business leader for this group said how many of those projects are we doing every year. And you know, they each said. well I only get one from this particular client and the other guy answered a pro yes this is similar he said well I only get one a year from this other client and he goes how much of this type of work is out in the market? Can we sell more projects like this and both of them are shaking their head no. We, yeah we can’t. This is a rarity, we very rarely sell these projects and they’re only for these clients and the business leader just said hey you know what guys we’re going to solve this problem right now. If we can’t sell any enough projects to make it profitable from the software standpoint, we’re not going to bid on these kind of projects anymore. So just bringing that data to the table

[23:57] you know, we had hope for one outcome. And we got a completely different outcome from the business leaders. It says, it doesn’t make sense to buy this software when we’re only selling two projects a year we’re getting out of this space and if our clients want this the company that writes the software has a consulting group they can go get their studies done from the software consulting group so it was a great example of using that data to take it back to the business owners, you know, the different departments that’s a great example. It was not something that I was planning on doing you know, I wasn’t planning on changing the line of business I was planning on like you said in my introduction, optimizing software value and reducing overhead. I did not see that one coming.

[24:50] Linda: Do you have any other quick examples of how you were able to use the data to either, you know, I know you had some challenges reacting to the changing in people’s work habits starting with the pandemic. Do you have any other examples from then or even currently on how you’ve been able to optimize the licensing? Just a quick example.

[25:16] Michael: Yeah, just as the industry’s shift you know we saw some infrastructure packages, we’ve seen increases in the number of transportation projects that are being awarded. We saw people put refineries on hold for a little bit we saw manufacturing centers get put on hold. We saw a huge increase in data centers. So as we saw the markets shifting because of the world circumstances, we were able to look at how it affected our licensing and and we call it our effective license position a term that we use. From or we learn from Open iT is you know how effective is our license position in the industry, and so we’ve we started to introduce those kinds of concepts. We know, you know, coming on with I mentioned the 500 interns that are coming on board, we kind of know exactly how much their software costs are going to be based on whether they’re an electrical intern or a chemical intern. And we can give the business the kind of an estimate. Hey, this is what it’s going to cost you to onboard these interns and it just again bringing that data to the surface.

[26:30] Bringing it into the discussions is the win in this kind of situation it’ll help you make business decisions on whether you’re hiring people or buying software.

[26:41] Linda: That’s great! So Michael, last question as we wrap up, and again we really appreciate the insight I know this is something. This kind of conversation is something that a lot of our you know, customers and prospects have been asking us so I know everybody appreciates it but you know, last question, what advice would you give to companies that are looking to whether they have a solution or not? What advice would you give for folks who are wanting to optimize their engineering licenses?

[27:07] Michael: Start early. I always say that yeah the faster you get into optimizing the more opportunity you have to save and that was one of the questions initially. It was well how much is this Open iT solution gonna cost us? I’m like, it does okay, if I can save one percent, if I can save a half a percent on my engineering technology licenses I got it covered trust me and that was the takeaway is you know we saved well over a half a percent we were probably closer to 10 savings on our licensing than and that’s with a six percent year-over-year growth right? It’s amazing!

[27:57] Start early because you’re just leaving money on the table if you’re not optimizing. And then I said that was the last question but we do have two more minutes. But do you want to make any comments on you know we talked about the evaluation process, your challenges but any comments on, you know, how do you measure the value in other words when you were evaluating, right everything costs money. Open iT certainly not the cheapest, so you want to have any final comments on that before we wrap up?

[28:26] Linda: Definitely! Leverage the knowledge that Open iT has from their consultants. You can buy the software, and you know go down your own path and try to figure this out yourself, or you can leverage some of the industry knowledge that they’ve gathered along the way. One of the key takeaways for us was you know in addition to saving money what’s the opportunity cost that we’re missing you know, when we have a software denial where we’re under licensed for some reason. How much is that costing us in productivity you know could we buy a license based on the amount of productivity that we’re losing from that denial. And we can also look at you know what they shared with us was the shelf work where you know, the software that we bought that we thought we had to have it just never panned out, it’s not getting the usage we thought we need it had. That it would get, it’s not bringing the value to the organization in terms of project revenue or productivity and just making those business decisions based off that data.

[29:34] Thank you, Michael! We’re we are out of time today and we really appreciate your time. We know we’ve talked all about you know, how complex your business is and how busy you are, so we really really appreciate your time today and I know that those who are participating here appreciate it as well. We’re not taking questions on this particular webinar but if you do have questions feel free to send us an email and we’ll get answers from Michael and get back to you with any questions that you have as a follow-up. And again we really appreciate Michael and Burns & McDonnell, they really are truly a not just a customer but a partner here at Open iT as we like to treat all of our customers and we appreciate your time today so everybody have a great day and we’ll talk to you soon hopefully. Thanks again! Thank you. Bye-bye.