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Business Overview

Nissan Motor Corporation Limited is a leading Japanese automaker. They produce low-cost, fuel-efficient vehicles, using high quality engineering tools. For production simulation and design, Nissan’s engineers use expensive Computer Aided Drafting and Engineering (CAD, CAE) software applications.

To improve business processes, Nissan investigated OpeniT as a solution with which to cut software license costs without compromising projects/jobs. Just by metering software usage, they were able to eliminate unused licenses, optimize IT assets and get more control over new software investments.Read on to see how Nissan, in just 5 months, used OpeniT metering tools on reducing more than 10% of their software license and IT costs, and achieved a 100% utilization rate of their CAE software.

Business Challenge

This Fortune Global 100 company had been in the manufacturing business for a long time, and had accumulated numerous IT assets. As the company grew, greater numbers of employees required more software. The diverse software licenses acquired led to higher operating costs, largely due to additional software rental charges and increased maintenance expenditures.

The existing IT system used an automated software license counting process, where a log file was automatically scripted. The CAD and CAE applications streamlined the job by uniting the script that automated the total processing of the log. However, it took two to three days to analyze each module in detail. Too much time and work was required to manage and monitor software license usage rates.

OpeniT Software Solution

OpeniT was selected as a software metering solution because it possessed the functional capability and reliability needed, and had strong customer support provided by Daikin Industry. After a six month trial period, OpeniT was completely installed and integrated by March, 2006. OpeniT metered license usage at Nissan’s Technical Center, their Design Center, and the Yokohama factory. Software usage was metered frequently, and the data was processed quickly by the OpeniT server located at Nissan headquarters.

OpeniT was more fully implemented in April, 2007. Calculating all Nissan’s engineering software applications’ monthly usage rates now took a few days each month, whereas previously days were used to analyze usage for only one module. The IT department’s work efficiency had improved greatly by using OpeniT for metering usage.