From Insights to Action: Using Data to Manage Your Autodesk Plans

DOUG ABT: This session contains some forward-looking statements about our product capabilities. These statements regarding planned development efforts are not a promise or guarantee of future availability of features, but merely reflect our current plans. Purchasing decisions should not be based upon these statements.

Welcome to our session on how to use Autodesk reports and data to go from insights to action, making it easier to manage your Autodesk plans. Today, you'll be hearing from two of us at Autodesk. I'm Doug Abt, product manager for customer reporting at Autodesk. I'm the product lead for all things related to the usage report, usage reporting, flex usage reporting, team insights and token Flex reporting. Emily Svensson is a group product manager for core admin focused on user management.

Before jumping into the session, let's look at what we'll cover. I'll explain the big picture value of using our reporting tools. Then I'll walk you through the different types of reports or data sources we offer because there are quite a few. After that, we'll share some helpful new features that we're adding to make your reporting much more efficient.

By the end of this session, you'll take away some tangible learnings to manage your Autodesk program more efficiently. You'll be able to, one, quickly identify and reassign any of your users who are on flex and should be on a subscription and vice versa to align user needs to their access types. Two, compare usage data to see which users, teams, or groups could be more productive with additional training. And three, explain the purpose and value of reporting APIs, including how you can use them in your corporate reporting tools, such as Power BI.

To start, let's get specific with what we can actually do by using data to manage our plans. It's easy to think abstractly about making data decision-- driven decisions, but what kind of decisions are we talking about? The tools we'll review today can help you answer tangible questions like how frequently do users access different product titles? On which products are our flex tokens being spent? How can I free up seats for new team members? Does John Doe really need access to this product?

Before I show you how to answer these questions, though, I want to recap why they matter. If you are here, it means that your organization is spending money on Autodesk software. And if you're an admin, it's part of your responsibility to make sure that money is well spent. To do that, you need to be looking at the data.

Managing your software program without looking at data is flying blind. You can't make informed licensing and assignment decisions. You may unintentionally be overspending or on the other hand, holding your users back from accessing the product titles they need the most to be creative and productive. When using data from Autodesk reporting tools, you can help yourself and your organization in four key ways-- Understanding your users' software needs, boosting productivity and adoption, managing products more effectively, and making smarter buying decisions that reduce the total cost of ownership.

If you've spent time in your Autodesk account and manage.autodesk.com, you know that there are a lot of different ways and places to access usage, and many of these are new within the last six to nine months. So let's clarify this a bit.

We can group these into three categories based on the level of effort required and level of insight offered by the different tools. The at-a-glance report types are available both on your Autodesk account home page as well as within the reporting left pane for insights. These help you quickly spot some key data points and link to more detailed reports.

Looking deeper, these tools are not front and center on account home page. You'll access them from your left navigation pane of account. You can find really interesting and detailed data points here, such as which versions are used the most. Which products are not used, but should be, to initiate training and onboarding discussions? The date which an end user last opened a product, the date the end user was assigned to a title, and for premium, how much time users spent in active mode for selected desktop products and versions?

Making the most-- this includes reporting APIs for premium plan users and building out custom reporting dashboards. These require more commitment and with an increased investment, enable your team to create reports tailored to your organization by joining your company's metadata with Autodesk provided usage data. Now, I'll show you each of these in greater detail.

This category of at-a-glance reporting tools are the ones you may be most familiar with. They're typically in prominent places, such as on the account homepage, and give you a quick glimpse into several key data points.

You may have noticed a new section at the top of your Autodesk account home page. This is a summary of your seats available, active users over the last 30 days, and a glimpse into your open support cases. This is an easy way to see at a glance whether there are quick actions you can take to improve the overall health of your account. For example, if you have available seats, those are licenses you are entitled to but have not yet assigned.

You can assign users by clicking Manage Seats, or if your team-- organization leverages multiple teams, you can consider moving users to another team that has a use for the license right now. Or perhaps you have simply purchased a few extra seats for pending new hires. This widget serves as a reminder front and center for you on the home page.

Moving to the central widget, the active users count is how you can tell whether your users are actually going in and using the products. Presumably, your organization has purchased software access because there's a business need. But if you see very few active users, then it's worth taking a deeper dive into the usage report to diagnose why usage is low. A fix could be as simple as checking a user's email address and then making sure they are aware they have access to the software and can get into it, while at other times, this could be a larger conversation around training and adoption for your user base.

On the right, you can see the number of open support cases. This is an easy way to keep on top of open support issues. You'll want to keep an eye on this section within account. We have some exciting things planned here. You'll continue to see this section evolve based on beta testing and direct customer experience interviews.

Team insights are an interesting tool because this is where we do the analysis and make recommendations for you. Team insights take a view of your team's product usage or license utilization and makes a recommendation based on that data, so you can easily see some curated content and then be prompted with an action to take.

We have two insights available for all admins. Under assignment shows your teams with available seats for specific products. Over assignment shows you subscriptions where the users have remained assigned after expiration. This insight is prepared for those subscriptions that you purchased directly from Autodesk. That is, not from a reseller.

And then there are two that are just for premium plan users-- inactive user-- users who have been continually assigned to a product yet have not accessed that assigned product in more than three months. Product version-- teams with usage on outlier product versions. Typically, we see this Insight related to very low usage on a fairly old or very new product.

If you're looking at the Insights tab under reporting, you may notice we offer two different types of insights-- Team Insights as well as My Insights. Admins can view Team insights, while My Insights are available to end users AutoCAD and Revit and other selected products. My Insights are more product focused, showing command summaries, application performance, file statistics, and learning path recommendations. Now, I'm going to hand it over to Emily, who will talk about some of the tools for managing your users.

EMILY SVENSSON: Thanks, Doug. Next, let's look at the tools to help you dig deeper into the data to uncover even more valuable opportunities where you can adjust levers to manage your plans and users more effectively. Earlier this year, we released an exciting new notification option that gives all primary admins the ability to create usage notifications, making it much easier to manage your subscriptions more efficiently. These notifications let you surface users who haven't used their assigned products for anywhere from 30 days to one year.

If you're a primary admin, you can then receive an email notification at your chosen frequency that prompts you to view the usage report, which is prefiltered to only show users who have been inactive during the chosen period. Once you're in the usage report, if needed, you can reallocate the subscriptions to more frequent users to better align user behavior with their access type. For a lot of teams, it's helpful to purchase Flex tokens to provide access for occasional users who access a product just a few days a month.

Another recent update, this summer, we released unverified user notifications to all admins. Unverified users are those who have been invited to access Autodesk software, but have not yet signed into their accounts or created an Autodesk password. Your unverified users are visible in the guided setup module on your account home page for the first 30 days after purchase. You will only see this notification if you have unverified users, so you might not be aware of this one. Once you see that you have unverified users, you can confirm email addresses, follow up with the person, or resend invitations if they've expired.

During our testing, we found that admins who are notified about unverified users are three times more likely to confirm email addresses, follow up with users, or resend invitations. These exciting results help to drive adoption. Now we'll switch gears a bit to review two important factors that can help set you up for success with reporting.

At Autodesk, your user list is where you can manage users and permissions, and it's called a team. You can organize sets of users within your team using groups. Everyone using any Autodesk product is by default part of a team. Your organization defaults to having one team, and most people just need one team.

But you can set up more for your organization if you need to. Most people just need that one team, but some customers create additional teams for different departments, offices, or subsidiaries. This makes it possible to keep the billing, subscriptions, admin permissions, and users for these departments, offices, or subsidiaries completely separate for legal or financial reasons.

Groups are a helpful way for you to organize users inside your team and automate product assignments for those users. For example, you could create a group for all the engineers across your company and set product assignments for the group. When you add users to that group of engineers, they automatically receive access to Revit and any other tools you determine are necessary. When you're ready to roll out a new product to your engineers, you can just add it to the group to apply the permission to all engineers automatically.

Once you've set up your teams and groups in a way that's meaningful to you, they can add a layer of context to the usage report that Doug will cover next. For example, looking at usage data by team can help you understand software costs by GO or business unit, giving you greater visibility into your overall spend. On the other hand, looking at usage data by group gives you a strong understanding of how users with similar roles might differ from one another.

It's always helpful to look for outliers, users with very few days used each month, to see whether the products you think should be assigned to a group are actually being used on a regular basis. For example, you might assign four products to a group of engineers, but only three of them are used regularly. Removing that fourth product from the group default assignment and providing access to it via flex tokens instead could save you a lot, and you wouldn't have been aware of that opportunity without viewing the data from a group perspective.

With your groups and teams set up, you can also keep track of movements across and between them with the admin activity log. This is a searchable log of changes made by admins in your account. You can see when users were invited and by which admin, when products are assigned or unassigned, and when users are removed from a team, and more. This is particularly helpful because admins often need to look into what changes are made to teams and by whom, so that you can make sure users have access to the right products at the right time for the right reasons. Now you have a clear and searchable log, so you don't need to call into Autodesk support to get that valuable information.

Now that you understand how to structure groups and teams for more valuable reporting, Doug will show you how to dig into that data.

DOUG ABT: Thanks, Emily. Our usage report is one of the powerhouses at your disposal. I'll play the short video to give you a walk through of the report and what you can see in it.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- With usage report, view all your users' product usage on one page, whether they are on subscriptions or flex. From your account portal, under reporting, select usage report. Here access a snapshot of important details for both subscriptions and flex, such as the total number of subscriptions for your team's seed counts and assignments, the number of flex tokens used and remaining, the monthly average of flex tokens being used.

Apply filters to surface only the data you need. Expand the team dropdown to view the usage data for your desired users. Expand the date range dropdown to specify the date you wish to review data from.

Here create a custom date range or choose from a pre-set date range. To refine the report even further, select filter. Here apply filters by access options, user activity, seed assignments, and more. If you would like to export your data for more in-depth analysis and insights, any applied filters carry over to the exported report.

From the results, review a list of users displayed with at-a-glance summaries, such as product use, average days of use per month, or the number of flex tokens used. Note that usernames display if your team's personal data in settings is on.

If personal data is off for one or more teams, hashed data values are shown for all teams. Select columns to choose which information to display. Click a column header to the list according to days used, monthly average, product, and more.

All columns are always contained within the export. This list can help you distinguish frequent users from occasional users and optimize their assignments. For example, if you notice that a user is only accessing a product a few days a month, you might assign them to a flex subscription or unassign them from the product entirely. For an in-depth view of a user's data associated with product use, select the user from the list.

A dialog displays the table of information on the user, including the teams they belong to, associated product use, and their access option. A separate row details other products and collections where the user is assigned. Expand another product to review activity information, such as how long it has been since the last access to the product. Once you have the information you need, close the dialog.

To unassigned users, select the checkbox associated with a user or users you would like to remove. Once the selection is made, a prompt indicates the number of users selected. From here, click on Assign. From the usage report page, quickly review usage information to optimize seat assignments and purchasing decisions for collections, individual products, and flex occasional use.

[END PLAYBACK]

DOUG ABT: As you can see, the usage report contains a lot of great information. I highly recommend spending some time exploring this page if you're not familiar with it yet. It's a valuable resource to help figure out which users are most active and those who are least active, helping you optimize assignments between subscriptions and flex.

Since that usage report video was created, we've launched a number of new features, so let's take a look at those. Here you can see our new assigned date column that's available in both the usage report UI and the export. It adds extremely important context to the usage data. For example, you may see that a user has zero days used, but do you know if that user was just assigned yesterday or six months ago?

The assigned date column gives you that detail, so you're not making decisions based on incomplete data. As a best practice, our customer success teams want all users to access their product or subscriptions and become productive right away. It may be worth a quick check-in if a user still shows no usage within a few days or weeks after being assigned.

Next, for our flex users, I hope you've explored the New Balances tab found under reporting on the left navigation pane of Autodesk account. On this page, you can see a team-by-team breakdown of your current flex token balances. The color coding makes it really easy to see which teams are low on tokens. When a team has less than 20% of their original token quantity remaining, their chart turns red.

Depending upon how quickly your team consumes tokens, you can purchase them using a link found on this page. You can also see some quick statistics on token usage over the last 90 days, including the number of products the team has used and the number of users consuming those tokens. This is another way to help you gauge your organization's usage and plan ahead for what you may need in the future.

We also recently released a new feature to this page where you can see how many tokens are expiring in the next 90 days, so you can make sure the tokens are used. This is a great enhancement because admins with multiple flex purchases, each having their own end date, can understand how many tokens from the combined pool are expiring and when. As a reminder, tokens are always spent in the order in which they're purchased, so users will automatically consume the oldest and the soonest-to-expire tokens first.

Admins with Flex users can also see a new Token Events view within the Balances tab. This shows you all of the non-consumption events that impact your balance, such as purchases, expirations, tokens moved to another team, and so forth. You can almost think of this like your transaction history in your bank statement. You get full transparency into how your current balance came to be.

The last group of tools are the ones that require a little more time and energy up front, but can drastically simplify your reporting processes overall. Generally, these are backed by APIs. Before diving into the value of the premium Reporting APIs, let's level set on what APIs are.

At a very simple level, Application Program Interfaces, also known as APIs, allow us to connect to applications or databases. For Premium Reporting APIs, this involves extracting your team's usage data from Autodesk account and connecting it to your own ecosystem using reporting tools such as Power BI. Not only does this let you create your own dashboards, but it is also a central place to connect with other data sources and metadata from within your own company. Ultimately, this helps you boost productivity while driving adoption and managing your software investment more effectively.

As a quick overview, you connect your Autodesk data to your corporate reporting systems like Power BI or Tableau. Then you can set your desired metadata, so you can sort and filter your product and user data by business segment, GO, cost center, project, or any other criteria of your choosing. You can then create your own reports to deliver the specific data you need to inform your decision-making process.

We also have published some code samples available in APS to help get you started, including the number of users who use only a single product title within a collection and flex users who use a product more than seven times in the past month. Ultimately, you can use the data from the premium Reporting APIs to help you meet your organization's goals, including improving productivity and adoption by seeing who has low usage and understanding whether those users or teams could use some coaching or best practices. Managing software more effectively by strategically incorporating your organization's metadata, like department and cost centers, to drill into the data using segments that are most meaningful to you. This could also look like standardizing product versions across teams through prioritized updates to reduce version conflicts.

Ultimately, a goal for everyone is to make smarter buying decisions. You can take the data coming out of the usage report and with the Reporting API, apply your own logic and thresholds to see what is the right license type for which user.

Implementing APIs requires technical support, so we recommend working with the developer. You may have these resources in-house, or you may need to contract through a third party temporarily.

The first step is to understand your organization's needs. There are two distinct reporting APIs with some overlapping data fields, so it is important that you have a strategy, think through your use cases, and then determine which API, or both, fits your use cases the best.

You'll then need to connect with development resources again. You may need to source through a third party, or perhaps you have the resources in house to implement these APIs. Then decide on your implementation strategy and secure the necessary budget. Now I'm excited to share a little bit about what my team has been working on recently.

We have quite a strong pipeline of new features coming your way over the second half of the year. These are enhancements to our existing tools to help make reporting more efficient for you. You can see that there are a number of new ways to help you quickly find specific information you may be searching for. This includes saving your preferred column views so you can set your preferred usage report columns to display and then when you revisit the same view will be there each time for you.

We're also adding a new search option where you can search by a user's name. Similarly, we will also be displaying users' email addresses. With that information, you can more easily see who is part of your organization by looking at the email domain. This can be helpful if you grant software access to end users from another organization. Plus, it's also helpful to differentiate any users with very common names.

Beyond that, we're making it easier to navigate between reporting views and user management, so you can save yourself some clicks when reviewing team data and then going in to act on it, for example, when reassigning users to products. We expect this to be extremely valuable for those of you managing very large teams. A little efficiency can go a long way at that scale.

We've also implemented a feedback mechanism on our reporting and export pages. Please give each report a thumbs up or thumbs down and leave a comment that I and my customer experience team will review. Enhancement suggestions to reporting pages are very welcome. Please continue, however, to use open support cases for any acute time-sensitive issues.

We shared a lot of information in this session. The course handout will be a helpful resource for you going forward. And I also want to share a few more tools the Autodesk teams put together to help admins like you.

If you're not part of it already, the tech manager community is available through autodesk.com. It is a great place to plug in, so you can read about the latest features and how they can help you manage your plans. You can also access your peers through the forums and view the tech manager roadmap to be the first to know about new and upcoming enhancements.

Our autodesk.com/support/account page also has answers to most reporting or management related questions, which you can find through a quick search on our website. And finally, we have some resources for those of you who have premium plans. We offer a premium coaching topics specific to usage reporting and the premium reporting API, which is a great way to get one-on-one time for your organization with an Autodesk expert.

If your developer prefers the self-serve approach, we also have a developer's guide with step-by-step guidance for setting up your premium Reporting APIs. Thank you all for attending this session. Thank you for making your time at Autodesk University schedule to learn how to put insights into action so you can effectively manage your Autodesk users.