OpenLM for AEC
Stop paying for Autodesk and Bentley seats no one's using
See exactly which seats are earning their keep — before your next true-up letter does the math for you.
68%
of large buyers overpay Autodesk market rate
20–50%
spend increase from untracked Bentley over-usage
$100K+
recovered by one OpenLM AEC customer, Ausenco, over several years
📄 Free brochure: license intelligence for AEC firms
ROI benchmarks, team-by-team impact, and full platform detail for Autodesk-, Bentley-, and BIM-heavy stacks.
A crane parked over the weekend still costs the same day rate. An idle AutoCAD seat works the same way.
Trusted by leading innovators
Your most expensive software is also your least tracked
The "just in case" buffer.
Firms set license counts once at renewal, then don't touch them until the next true-up letter arrives.
True-ups erase savings.
True-up exposure runs 12–18% of annual license cost when it's caught at audit instead of managed.
BIM is outgrowing governance.
70% of construction firms have adopted BIM. Almost none track seat-level usage.
SOURCE: G2, “60 Construction Statistics for 2025”
Where it breaks
PROJECT DELIVERY
Delivery risk
No seat available when a submission deadline can't wait.
MULTI-OFFICE
Multi-office blind spots
No shared pool across offices means duplicate spend.
COST TRACKING
No cost visibility
Software costs get estimated per project, not billed from real usage.
RENEWALS
Zero-leverage renewals
Vendors show up to renewal with usage data. Most firms don't.
**Each plays out differently depending on your firm’s size, stack, and office footprint.
Case studies
AEC firms cutting license waste with OpenLM
recovered in license spend
Across 26 offices, 14 countries. Reporting time cut from days to minutes.
saved over 2 years
28 US offices, ~20 fewer license-tracking hours every week.
license surplus uncovered
500 users across 20 branches in North America and India.
See usage vs. idle time
Session-level tracking
Checkout time, active time, and idle time, per user, per project, across 100+ license managers.
Automated idle harvesting
Configurable thresholds release unused seats automatically. No one has to remember to log off.
Per-project breakdown
Usage rolls up by users, teams, or client projects, and feeds straight into cost accounting.
One console, every office, every project
Multi-office pooling
Share one elastic license pool instead of managing each office separately.
Project-level billing data
Tie usage to project codes for accurate client billing.
Reporting in minutes
Ausenco cut semi-annual reporting from 1–2 days to an automated export.
Negotiate renewals with data, not guess
At renewal, OpenLM gives a granular-level usage telemetry of your Autodesk and Bentley licenses.
Gap analysis
See where you're over-licensed or running too close to the edge, by product and by office.
Chargeback data
Project-level usage feeds finance systems directly.
True-up protection
Continuous monitoring means entitlement always matches peak usage.
Every denied seat is a deadline at risk
With OpenLM, organizations can log and attribute every denial, so patterns surface before they become schedule problems.
Spot the pattern
see which tools and time windows generate the most denials.
Quantify the cost
denial-duration tracking turns "annoying" into a dollar figure.
Near-zero denials
idle seats auto-return to the pool before the next request comes in.
Feature-level monitoring
100+ supported license managers, including Autodesk CLM, Bentley licensing, and FLEXlm:
What changes, by team
FAQ
Does this work with Autodesk's newer subscription licensing (CLM), or only older network licenses?
Both. OpenLM supports Autodesk CLM alongside traditional network licenses, plus Bentley licensing, FLEXlm, and 100+ other license managers spanning CAD, BIM, civil, and structural tools — so firms mid-transition between license models aren’t left with a blind spot.
We run Bentley SELECT alongside Autodesk — can we monitor both from one place?
Yes. Bentley’s SELECT and usage-based licensing are tracked the same way as Autodesk seats, in the same dashboard, so gap analysis and renewal data aren’t split across two separate systems.
If we reduce our license count, will our team see more denials during a deadline crunch?
Rightsizing is based on actual peak concurrent usage, not last year’s headcount, so counts come down without cutting into real demand. Several firms report denials dropping, not rising, once idle seats are pooled instead of sitting locked to one office.
Can we tie Revit or Civil 3D usage to a specific client project for billing?
Yes. Usage rolls up by project code, feeding project-level chargeback and cost accounting — useful on time-and-materials contracts where software cost is currently estimated rather than billed from actual use.
Does license usage data help us prepare for an Autodesk or Bentley true-up before it happens?
Yes. Continuous usage monitoring keeps entitlement matched to peak demand year-round, so gap analysis and chargeback data are already in hand before a renewal or audit — rather than being reconstructed after a true-up letter arrives.
Your next Autodesk true-up is already on the calendar
Get the ROI benchmarks and team-by-team breakdown before it arrives.