Why You Need Both Flex and Subscription

PRISCILLA NING: Hi, everyone. My name is Priscilla Ning, and I'm a marketing communications specialist at Autodesk. I've been working on Subscription and Flex since each have launched, so I'm very excited to explain why you need both Flex and Subscription today with the help of two very special guests.

First I'll be covering the options you have at Autodesk and how you can value from finding the right combination to fit your needs. Next, to the section you've been anticipating the most, you'll hear directly from industry leaders as they candidly share their tips and tricks on maximizing value and their advice for you. I'll close with three easy steps it takes to get started today and the ultimate list of resources to answer all your questions and get you up and running immediately.

Let's jump right in to your purchasing options at Autodesk and what you can consider. If you're a current Subscription customer with us, you already know what to expect. An Autodesk subscription is the perfect option for users who need consistent access to specific products or industry collections from monthly, annual, or multi-year term. Get unlimited access to the tools you need to design and make the future.

Meanwhile, Flex offers flexible access to more than 100 products by using prepaid tokens for each day of use and is very ideal for occasional users. Access products immediately and quickly adjust to changing needs or staff fluctuations with a shared pool of tokens that can unlock software access. Flex is our newest option, so let's take a look at how you can leverage Flex.

Flex is certainly a better value for your occasional users that use their subscriptions less than seven days a month and for varying needs. Interns are a great source of creativity and talent, but it can be such a headache to move around subscriptions just for them to leave after only three months. Same when it comes to contractors or fluctuations in your workforce. Instead, provide them temporary access with Flex. For seasonal highs and lows and evolving project demands, Flex ensures that there's no unused subscriptions or last minute procurement needs.

With Flex, you also have the ability to assign the full portfolio of the products available with Flex, or you can pick and choose which products that you would like your users to get access to out of the 100 plus products available. This feature gives you extra control while allowing you to push your team's limits and see what your users can create when there's no roadblocks to creativity. They can experiment with new products and find ways to think outside the box and improve their work so your team can stay competitive and evolve with the industry.

You're busy. We totally get it. There's no time to waste in your day. No need to constantly move around single user subscriptions between your users or worry about users getting locked out of products ever again. Assign your users to Flex once and it manages itself.

No more wait times for your users to get up and running. Use Active Directory Sync to add users quickly from your organization's directory and keep user information up to date. Create groups in your Autodesk account to assign many users at once and leverage usage reporting to optimize your Flex and subscription usage.

Quickly estimate for your upcoming year by estimating the tokens that will provide you access to all products with our token estimator tool instead of having to guess the specific number of subscriptions you need for each product you use. Or skip the painful process altogether of estimating up front and just purchase tokens as you go. And as you can see, you're going to see value for the business, value for the users and value for the admins.

So here's a look at what managing Flex looks like. Using our token estimator tool, purchase the tokens you need for your team. Like a subscription, you decide the access you want to provide. Unlike a subscription, you assign an unlimited number of users to Flex and decide whether all users can access all products or some users can access specific products. To streamline this process, we've built user management tools and features to automate user management.

Once assigned, your users access, most products for a daily charge that covers use of the product regardless of how many times your users open and close it or which version they use. No tokens are charged for accessing read only or viewer modes. And if a user accidentally clicks on a product they did not mean to open, you will not be charged if they close it within five minutes.

Most products and versions even have an idle feature built in that will suspend the daily token charge if your user's product becomes inactive or they forget to log out. You will not be charged until your user starts using the product another day. Just in case, it's still a best practice to close the product whenever it's not in use to avoid excessive charges. Alternatively, some services are charged per result, such as rendering a model, and some products in Flex are free and consume no tokens at all.

Check your usage reports to get a high level summary of your usage or dive deep into the data to find out who's using what products, how frequently, and when. Maximize value by tracking usage to find the perfect balance between Flex and subscription.

The third option is getting the best of both worlds. You can purchase your own combination of subscriptions for users who regularly access the same products or industry collections. And then you can purchase Flex tokens for users who need occasional access or access to a wide variety of products.

Now that you've heard about our options, let's discuss the differences between Subscription and Flex. While we recommend you keep your users that need frequent product access on Subscription, assign Flex for all other varying needs, such as occasional users, managers who review the work of others, temporary users such as summer interns and contractors, and exploratory users that can keep your business competitive with new technology and develop a proof of concept or trial a new workflow. Not everyone needs a dedicated subscription, and that's what Flex is best for.

We offer subscriptions for either individual products or bundles of products in an industry collection. With Flex, regardless of whether you purchase 100 tokens or 100,000, you receive access to over 100 different Autodesk products, which crosses all industries. Subscriptions are available on a monthly, annual, or three year term, and you can purchase more Flex tokens at any time for uninterrupted usage. Therefore, Flex tokens are good for one year from the date of purchase while subscriptions have a term.

Next, subscriptions are bundled with our standard plan benefits, which can be upgraded to a premium plan for different benefits on top of your standard plan. Flex is also bundled with the standard plan. And a special note to consider is that Flex users will receive premium benefits at no extra cost if premium has already been purchased for your subscriptions.

And finally, a subscription is dedicated to one named user. Admins can reassign access to other users, but only one person at a time can use that subscription. Flex, however, is a shared pool of tokens that supports any number of named users. It's the token balance here that matters, not the number of users. So as many users as you want on Flex, it just determines how many tokens you have available for them to access. And as you can see, almost all benefits can benefit from both. There's benefits with Subscription and Flex that are unique to each.

But don't just take it from us. Hear from your peers on how they leverage Flex to achieve their goals faster. Gruner AG is a leading engineering and planning company based in Basel, Switzerland. Founded in 1862, they have over 1,100 employees across more than 30 locations across Europe. Originally specializing in hydraulic engineering and hydropower, Gruner now offers a comprehensive range of services across construction, infrastructure, and energy, completing almost 8,000 projects a year.

I'm very excited to welcome Jan Partsch, the VDC manager at Gruner. At Gruner, he leverages data driven technologies and process digitization for its operational business. Among his other responsibilities, Jan focuses on optimizing Autodesk users, Autodesk products for his users at Gruner.

Today, Jan has graciously agreed to share his experience with optimizing the combination of subscription and Flex. And you'll want to make sure that you listen till the end to get a very exclusive look at their customized usage reporting dashboard built with Autodesk APIs so you can too make data driven decisions to maximize value and better support your users.

Jan, thank you so much for joining us from Gruner. I'm really excited to be able to chat with you today about your Flex and Subscription experience. Why don't we start by hearing a little bit about Gruner and any recent projects the company has completed so that the audience can get an idea of what you're working on?

JAN PARTSCH: Yeah, hi. Thank you. Thank you, first of all, for having me. Yeah, I'm working at Gruner. It's a company based in Switzerland. Currently, we're covering a lot of specialties in engineering for infrastructure like highways, train lines, bridges, building and building services, also consultancy and planning and specialized engineering services for buildings. And still a very big market is energy, energy supply, specialized in hydropower and power grids. And we're covering all over the globe projects with big dams and barrages, but also hospitals, bridges, train stations.

PRISCILLA NING: What would you say is your role and your day to day responsibilities?

JAN PARTSCH: At Gruner working as a strategic VDC management and also software portfolio management in a smaller team of 10 colleagues. And we're mainly working on harmonizing and optimizing our data flows through the different systems. So I'm working in a department with a lot of IT specialists focusing on our ERP, CRM systems, finance systems, and of course, also our project platforms like the ACC we are mainly managing digital project planning and delivery. And there I'm mainly responsible for centralizing the Autodesk license management.

Currently, we are having around 500 people working with Autodesk products, some on a daily basis, some rather rarely. And we have around 350 users working with ACC products. Our main products are still Autodesk, AutoCAD, and followed by Revit and Civil 3D. I think those are our main authoring software.

PRISCILLA NING: What challenges were you dealing with before Flex that made you think about making a change?

JAN PARTSCH: Yeah, we got to hear from the Flex model quite early when it got released, and we were interested actually in this different scope of use. Actually, it is a different kind of license as the Apple license, as a subscription license. And it helps us a bit making our license pool more efficient.

Because as I mentioned already before, we have many users with many fields of activity. Some project managers only sometimes need a product every now and then. We have some other power users who work on a daily basis with many products in parallel. And it's hard to really make a good guess on how much products does a person need, who has the right subscription, should we go for AC collection only, should we get many different product, subscriptions, et cetera, et cetera.

And then Flex gives a lot of flexibility, as the name says. And yeah, a few users who use products very rarely can have those subscriptions. Others who are power users on certain products but only sometimes need a specialized product can use Flex. So this was for us an interesting conception of a subscription for reducing our administrative effort, which got really immense at a certain point.

PRISCILLA NING: Got it. So sounds like Flex was able to provide additional visibility and flexibility when it comes to managing your users and in their day to day work as well. How did you end up hearing about Flex and were there any misconceptions at that time or any ideas that you had when you first heard about it that made you hesitate?

JAN PARTSCH: We got to hear from Flex in, I think, September or October '22 by our Autodesk customer success team and also our reseller here in Switzerland. And of course, there were some, I would say, fears about maybe limited overview in the usage and that maybe pay per use could be more expensive for some people. But of course, also could be cheaper than having the subscription.

And yeah, there were a bit those reservations on are we actually able to manage this? Is it actually a good deal for us or not? And can we see that? And this is also a bit the moment where we thought about how can we grasp this data? How can we get an overview and start creating the dashboard that we will maybe later talk about?

So we had some reservations about is it a good deal for us or not. But we thought, yeah, we must tackle the problem and analyze the usage data that Autodesk is providing and get on top of our data that we're producing and our usage data and see is it a good deal or not, and try to prove should we stick with subscription only or should we go with Flex only. Or is it not either/or but both together?

PRISCILLA NING: Like you said, a lot of it is just through experimentation. You have to test it out to see what works best for your company. And so even if you have fears, it's impossible to exactly know what it's going to turn out to be. And so that's why we have very small token packs that you can start with, buy a really small amount of tokens just to try it out and just see if it fits your company and your needs.

JAN PARTSCH: Yeah, this is also what I would recommend. Maybe just start getting with a very small package. And I mean, in the end, if immediately it turns out that it is more pricey for the company, you can just cancel the access for all of your users to the token package, and there's not much to lose or it's just a small package and there's not really a big risk in just giving it a try.

And at the moment already, after two years of tokens, there are quite good reporting tools in the Autodesk managed platform already. So you can actually quite well see if your usage is efficient or not.

PRISCILLA NING: Yeah, that's great to hear and really good advice. What would you say were the main factors that you considered and weighed when you were deciding to stick with Flex or not?

JAN PARTSCH: After so many years going already with Autodesk products, that we had this very different user profiles in our company, and we all went with subscription, because there wasn't anything else. And after quite some months, we could already make a quite informed guess on there are really many people who should rather stick with Flex, because it's just cheaper.

And additionally, we also saw that with more possibilities of having not only a certain subscription or a certain set of subscription, but for every now and then here, you can maybe also use inventor that you use twice per year maybe. But if you have it, you can use it. And with the possibilities also the needs rise a little bit but make also your team more productive. And this was also a positive outcome of it.

PRISCILLA NING: Yeah, that's fantastic to hear. And I know you just mentioned that you've been with Flex since pretty much the launch. So it's been quite a couple of years that you've been able to gather data and see how it's going. So how would you say your experience with Flex has been overall and how has it impacted your business?

JAN PARTSCH: Overall, the experience with Flex is very positive. We could see that some users were clearly not on the right license plan with going with subscription only. We had the very complex user profiles. And we could see that there were definitely a lot of inefficiencies in our subscription usage. So a mix between Flex and Subscription license was the right way for us.

We could see this in the dashboards that Autodesk provides online, the management platform, but also we build also with our own analytics where we are always checking if our users should rather be on a Flex token license plan or if they should go with our subscriptions. What is more pricey or less costly for them and their needs?

And we try to give our business, we're making some business analytics on it, and we provide those dashboards to our different departments and enable them to make informed decisions about their users and their future needs based on their past product usage. And so they can forecast their license need. And so we're managing both at the same time using the downloads of the usage data that Autodesk provides on Flex, same as on subscription.

PRISCILLA NING: So for everyone joining us that only manages Subscription right now, I think that it's a great opportunity for you to share with us about how your experience has been managing both Flex and Subscription. Do you think it has been more challenging than just managing subscription by itself?

JAN PARTSCH: We just recently acquired an HVAC company with around 45 users. And they only work with two AC collections and six Revit licenses, and they were always shuffling those licenses around. They had no Flex. And now we were able to take their licenses into our pool and assigned additionally Flex to all of them.

And we see there is a rise in costs, of course, because they pay the subscriptions and token Flex on top. But the administrative effort is basically 0 now, and before it was quite several hours by their IT manager per week. And this is always something you have to weigh. I would say it's definitely easier to manage a mixed pool.

PRISCILLA NING: Wow, that's great. Thank you for sharing. And how do you manage your users day to day?

JAN PARTSCH: We are pulling, actually, with the Autodesk Premium Reporting API. We are pulling the usage data from the Autodesk Platform Services and put it into our analytics platform, which is a Qlik Sense, but you can also use Power BI or whatever.

PRISCILLA NING: That's fantastic to hear. Do you mind giving us a look at what you work with?

JAN PARTSCH: Yes, of course. So this is the dashboard that we're providing to each of our different business units restricted to their users only. But here, as we have the admin overview, we see all of our license pool, which is here currently 530 licenses. And we see that there are 330 working on Flex token and 200 have an AC collection.

And what we can also see here is the black line is our costs rising. Here in this case, it's around one and a half years from beginning of '23 till now, end of August '24. And we see also the direct comparison in the red line. And what would be the price if every user was on AC collection. That's what we see here. And in orange, what would have been the price, like a theoretical one, if everybody was on Flex token. And so we see here our price in black is way lower than the one or the other model. So we already see the mixed use is reducing prices for us.

And especially we also see apparently the distribution of who should get the AC collection. So the [INAUDIBLE] usage and who should get the pay-per-use model, the Flex model, is kind of good. But what we also see with the green line is it could be optimized. There are some users who potentially from their usage in the past should in the future get the AC collection, because they are maybe rather power users and use the product every day. Or maybe they have the AC collection and pay a fixed price per year, but actually they barely draw with any product and should rather use pay per use because they just have a rare usage of products.

So this is this overview. Maybe to have a more better insight, we just focus on '24. Then we see it a bit more in detail and have more up to date data. And so also here we see-- and then we see an overall inefficiency, I call it, or savings potential. We see the line, the black line to the green line is still 20% of the price. So 1/5. And that could be some optimization.

This dashboard here, of course, is for purposes of presentation, a bit more anonymous than it normally is. Normally we have here, of course, the names of the users here in this board, whereas within license plan we view recommended. We also don't see those cryptic numbers but normally the usernames. And what we see here is the size of this square or rectangle is the bigger the size is, the more inefficient the license plan has been for this user in the period that we are observing.

And if it flashes red, it means this user is currently using a Flex license but should switch to subscription, like the red bar here. And the other way around, of course. This user is currently a subscription user and should potentially switch to Flex. We can just click on this one, for example, and we see the suggestion, potentially Flex. And we see the usage has been like the cost would have been like this, the orange line with Flex. But the subscription price that we invoice internally monthly would have been way higher, actually 76% higher.

And the other way around, we have a user here where the board flashes red is a Flex user. He has one license, Flex. And the price of Flex token that actually have been, I would say, burned is quite high. And the subscription price would have been here. So we see the other way around an inefficiency of 68%.

Our business can then, of course, also see this in real numbers. But also for data privacy reasons, this is grayed out here. So you just see the relation of the full price, 100%. You see the optimization possible for this user. And you see the savings potential in percent. And you can then see this for here in this case, we see it for the entire business. We can see this per business unit. We can see this per little department. We can see this per user.

And what it helps us is also in making informed decisions for future purchases of licenses. For example, we can see that if we click on all Flex users, we see how many in total should potentially switch to AC collection if they would have the same usage as the last year. And the other way around, we can see how many users are currently on AC collection and should switch towards Flex.

And when we count, we see this is a little bit more of orange squares in comparison to red squares. And so we see potentially maybe next year we can still reduce some AC collections and go with a bit more Flex. There's no need to currently purchase new licenses. There's still potential to shuffle around licenses within our license pool. So this is also very helpful tool for the annual license report and license renewals.

PRISCILLA NING: This is fantastic. Thank you for giving us a sneak peek. I especially love the savings potential section you have. It's just so handy to be able to look and just see how much more you could further optimize. Honestly, it makes managing reporting and licenses fun. Thank you for sharing. It's a great example of how--

JAN PARTSCH: You're welcome.

PRISCILLA NING: Businesses can upgrade their analytics and their licensing, basically get granular with the data and figure out exactly how much they can save every year. And as we close out, is there any advice that you can give to anyone watching that is hesitant about giving Flex a try or hesitant about managing both Flex and subscription?

JAN PARTSCH: Only advice I can give is definitely do not hesitate in giving it a try. There are really small packages. And so as I mentioned already earlier in this talk, there's not much to lose. Just give it a try and see what it helps. And is it worth for you to have less admin work or is it maybe producing more costs for you.

And I would also advise you just saw a lot of management of licenses and weighing do go for Flex, do I go for subscription. What does it cost? It needs a very detailed work with the pricing model and the licensing system. Don't put this weight on the shoulders of your users. Don't let them know too much about this pricing model and the costs behind it and how they should use it and how Autodesk is calculating the costs per different product, et cetera.

I think, or at least my impression is, people should focus on their core business, what is in our case, doing good engineering work and doing a good project. And the management should be done in the background and it should not put on the shoulders of the employee to know when he should maybe close down his Revit or when not and et cetera, et cetera.

Don't over micromanagement. It just ends up in frustration. And maybe also some people feel restricted in just working freely with their products. In the end, it's their tool to do their work every day, and they shouldn't feel restricted in doing what they think they need.

PRISCILLA NING: That's great. And I'm sure that's why Gruner is a leader in their industry. They're able to just empower everyone to do what they do best with no limits. And it's so great to hear that we're able to help you with that. And so thank you so much.

Gruner is able to leverage both Flex and Subscription to maximize value for the business, the admin, and the user. They use data to flag their usage inefficiencies and ensure that they do not have occasional and varying users on Subscription.

As Jan called out, it's easier to manage a mixed pool. They're able to maximize their workforce and let their admins focus on higher level tasks. They keep the users focused on doing their jobs, completing projects to the best of their ability, instead of worrying about product access and over or under using products. Unaffected by reassignments to Flex or Subscription, they can continue accessing the products they rely on and have the flexibility to access new products for differing project cycles or if they would like to enhance their work.

Although Gruner chooses to build their own dashboard with Autodesk APIs, all the information you need is available in reporting in your Autodesk account. This is the best starting point for making decisions and making an improvement plan. Use data to assess where you stand today and make a plan to start optimizing your usage by right sizing Flex and subscription.

You may have heard of our next guest, Mercury Engineering, a European leader in construction solutions based in Dublin, Ireland. They are a powerhouse trusted by some of the world's most impactful corporations to deliver complex engineering and construction projects. Their 8,500 plus employees across 16 offices provide solutions that deliver technologies and life changing enhancements. I'm excited to welcome Philip, head of IT at Mercury, where he is responsible for the IT strategy and service execution across the Mercury group.

Thank you so much for joining us today, Philip. I'm very excited to hear about your experience at Mercury Engineering. It would be great if you can start with sharing some background on Mercury and any recent projects the company has completed.

PHILIP ADAMS: Yeah, no problem, Priscilla. Pleasure to join you today. So Mercury is a European leader in construction solutions, and what that means is that we build and manage quite complex construction projects for some of the world leading organizations, very much household names. And these organizations are very much focused on delivering technologies and life changing advancements that connect people, communities, and businesses. And it's a great privilege to be part of that journey with these organizations and help them realize those solutions.

In terms of our size and scale, we generated 1.6 billion euros in revenue last year. And for the US audience, that's just over or just under $1.8 billion. And we did this across four main sectors, business sectors that we've grouped into data centers, semiconductor, life sciences, and what we call the live environment. Currently we're operating across 20 different locations, which encompasses about 16 countries within Europe. We're doing this with a workforce of almost 7,500 people, which is made up of employees and subcontractors.

Some of these projects are multi-year projects. They take quite a while sometimes to spin up from inception, and they can run for multiple years. And in doing that, we're working very much within a general contracting space where we can focus on delivering those services direct to our client.

PRISCILLA NING: It would be great if you could also let me a little bit about your role and your responsibilities at Mercury as well.

PHILIP ADAMS: Yeah, sure. So my main role is I'm head of IT for Mercury. I've been in the role for over 10 years. And within that, my main responsibility is delivering the full IT strategy for the business. So I work very much with my peers within the business, all the business unit leads, heads of functions, understanding what they require to be able to deliver their services.

So essentially, they are my customer, for want of a better description. And want to make sure that they have leading technologies to be able to deliver their services. I'm also very much focused on providing IT excellence so that we can scale and provide the technology solutions that they require. And that covers all the business applications that we use, applications from a back office and front office perspective, our full infrastructure, all the hardware and various other software applications, and also unfortunately these days, having to keep an eye on the whole cyber security footprint.

So that's really what my role entails. And how I do that, as I said, is very much in partnership with the business. That strategy is really defined upon and linked to the overall company strategy, identifying the key pillars within our group strategy called go beyond and making sure that the IT strategy is aligned to that. And Autodesk solutions are a key part of that, and they're one of the biggest software footprints within our organization.

PRISCILLA NING: Got it. And I love that you mentioned that there's so much to think about now in your role, the pros and the cons. And so as you mentioned, one of your responsibilities is managing Autodesk users. So I would love to hear more about that. How many Autodesk users do you have and what products do they use most frequently?

PHILIP ADAMS: Yeah, our footprint in Autodesk has dramatically increased over the last four or five years. It's always been a key solution for Mercury. But as we've grown, we've really made sure we have strong strategic alliances with solution providers such as Autodesk. The two primary products which, obviously, most of the people and the biggest volume of users consume is Flex and also BIM 360 Autodesk Construction Cloud within that whole Autodesk Construction Solutions Portfolio.

In terms of Flex, it does have peaks and troughs from one year to the next based on our levels of activity and the type of projects we're doing. But in 2022, 2023, where we were hitting numbers of 700 plus unique users and the three top products within the Flex portfolio would have been Navisworks, Revit, and AutoCAD.

From a BIM 360 Autodesk Construction Cloud perspective, we've mandated that as a primary field application for all our projects. And to date, we have only 5,300 people within the Mercury capacity collaborating across that platform. We have other products as well, but those are the two primary ones that we run within the business.

PRISCILLA NING: That's good to know. And I know that in this session earlier, we covered a little bit about what Flex is, but I would love to know more about why you decided personally in Mercury to go with Flex and what challenges you were dealing with that led you to come to that conclusion that Flex would be a really good fit for you.

PHILIP ADAMS: So to put some context on why Flex is a good fit and why we selected it, obviously going back a number of years ago, it was primarily subscription based licensing for those products. I think the challenge that we had then is that the previous performance in terms of the history of how many licenses we need in a particular product constantly changed. It was difficult for us to predict into the future what levels of activity were required.

And some of the challenges we faced under that subscription model was the business would request something generally the day before they needed it at best, and we had to react very quickly trying to determine how many they needed, what particular product, raising purchase orders, getting them approved, and then obviously getting the subscription and then the product to the end user in an effective and efficient manner. And that often led to delays for them being able to consume it.

So a number of years ago, we were early adopters of the pay per use model, PPU, under the early access program or early adoption program. And that allowed us, therefore, to buy tokens which had that full suite of products, prepay for that, buy that in advance, and then address that problem that we had of fast provision of those solutions to our user base.

So we had that PPU for about four years before I suppose it was being sunsetted and the Flex was the natural obvious one to replace that. The terms and conditions around Flex were very, very similar to those for PPU in terms of how we wanted to consume it. And it allowed us to look at our previous run rate in terms of the solutions.

We've got all the data from the measurements and the system itself, and then we can look forward to our activity for the next 12 months to allow us to accurately predict how many tokens we would need across the different product sets and product lines within Flex so that we could at least purchase that and allow people to quickly consume it. And we do that by the fact that we use Active Directory within Mercury, so we can set people up within groups. That's fully synchronized with our Flex platform to allow us to be able to allow people to get access to that when they need.

Within our business, we would have a lot of highs and lows in terms of usage through a construction cycle. And when you have multiple projects, you can imagine that's constantly changing. So that token consumption model suits us very well, addressing the problems of being able to get access, number one, measure who is using what when, allows us to look ahead in terms of what we need, how we need to budget for that.

And one of the other big advantages that we're able to therefore analyze who's consuming it, when, and what products, and because there's obviously particular, from a commercial perspective, burn rates and token rates associated with each of these products, we're able to accurately predict and charge and allocate the cost appropriately across our projects that are consuming the full suite of solutions under Flex.

PRISCILLA NING: You also mentioned having the ups and downs, different seasons of different demand and being able to decrease your usage of tokens when you're having a lull in the season. Are there any other primary factors that were a pain point for you with Subscription that I missed there?

PHILIP ADAMS: You're absolutely right. The first priority was addressing those challenges, which we would have been able to do through PPU and now Flex. The fact then that we're able to gather that accurate data because of the analytics that you can get from it, then we can see a nice history. So we're able to map that against current activities. So if we're trying to look a year or even 18 months ahead based on our level of activities and our level of activities in particular sectors are rising or falling, we're able to map that back to past usage. So we can model to allow us to accurately estimate how many tokens we need.

Under that old the subscription model, obviously when people came asking for 10 Navisworks licenses or 20 Navisworks, they had a perceived need at that point in time. I had to balance that against the rest of the business as well. But you knew they needed it when they asked for it. Where obviously, when we're buying tokens, we're trying to group it all together and look at a holistic need for the entire business across all the products under Flex.

So without that data, that would be quite difficult to do. But over four or five years, we've gathered that data, and we can map that against the current projects in our pipeline and accurately estimate how many tokens we need. So that was a key thing and decision making before we went into that.

Ultimately, my role is to make sure that we buy the right solutions at the best price and make use of it is the key thing, getting value from that. So the last thing I want is shelfware, unused licensed software, subscriptions, whatever it happens to be that aren't being consumed and we're not getting value from. Because although people will get value maybe at different stages, I want to optimize that as much as possible.

PRISCILLA NING: I know mentioned that you had to re-educate your users. So did you choose to let everyone know they're on Flex or how have you communicated to them or do they have no idea?

PHILIP ADAMS: A lot of them probably didn't have any idea. In this space, we would have a lot of people joining in and leaving the organization. It's quite a churn, I suppose. At a senior level in terms of the team leads, the people responsible for the particular models and the projects that they're working on, they'd be very, very aware of it.

But all they really want to make sure is that they know how to get access to it. They get access to the right products. They're there ready to then consume when they start on a project, join the organization. We have a very clear process around that. And yes, we've obviously indicated what's available to them and so forth. So let them work with that if they get caught up, I suppose, in any commercial elements as a distraction from their day job.

But their line management would be very aware. And those are the people that I would work with to try and predict that activity. I would be sharing with them the results around who's consuming the most based on and their run rate and the token burns and so forth. So we get all that data out of the system. And that helps them understand and almost even balance their productivity within their own teams, that they can see who needs it and when they need it and what they're using it for based on, I suppose, the [INAUDIBLE] parts, the project that they're working on, as well.

Another beauty about it is that we didn't need to try to understand and manage who are heavy and light users as well. That often became a challenge within the organization, especially on a subscription basis, trying to figure out how much they needed to consume and when. And whereas now you can have heavy, light users, everyone's on the same plan, essentially, and they can consume as required and it just evens out.

PRISCILLA NING: Do you do anything with users who are consuming too little or too much or for you it's just data to analyze and have? Or are you taking action upon it?

PHILIP ADAMS: I would say with the business units and the projects that are using this, they could, because they know what their teams are working on better than I do. When it's split across 600, 700 people I wouldn't have the level of knowledge around what they're consuming on the projects they're working on. But that's why we share that usage data with the administrators for those projects who would have access to it.

And they would definitely be able to delve into that and understand that if there's any anomalies there in terms of why a particular product within Flex is being used by a group or a single individual, which doesn't make sense based on what they're tasked with doing. But I haven't heard of any situations or scenarios where that has been an issue or a problem. And it's more a case of good data in terms of making sure people have access to the solutions.

PRISCILLA NING: Speaking of concerns, I know it's been a while, but when you were starting with Flex or even during the journey, did you have any reservations? And what were your thoughts that some of these customers listening in might share?

PHILIP ADAMS: Yeah, I suppose when we first modeled PPU and Flex, on the face of it, we felt that there was a premium to use Flex. And we fully believe that based on the data we've got the model through Flex, that perceived premium that you may have when you compare the two models is absolutely worth it to us. And that's something I had to justify within the business, because obviously these costs are being allocated to them, but also to the CFO. And for us, it was a no-brainer. It really did prove to be successful.

And we're in this token based environment, whether PPU or Flex, for now five years. And we've obviously during that five years had peaks and troughs in terms of the volume we require. But based on the admin overhead being removed, the simplicity, the measurement, the data we now have, any perceived premium there we absolutely think is worth it. So that's certainly something if anyone thinking about it feels it is a premium product, it's worth it based on the value and the extra value and services you get from the model.

PRISCILLA NING: That's great to hear. I'm glad that it has been very valuable for your business and it was a no-brainer in the end. I know that you've been with us so many years now and have seen us through so many changes we've made with Flex. How has your experience been overall and how has it impacted your business?

PHILIP ADAMS: Very positive. The key thing for the business, they just want to consume the solutions to help them do their job so that our clients are happy with the successful delivery. And any delay at all in getting access is going to cause, albeit small, it all adds up and it could cause a significant problem on a construction site. So overall, it's been very positive. There were challenges around maybe getting some of the data we needed out of the portal, but those have been resolved.