The CADENAS licensing landscape: The “state of the union”
In modern engineering and procurement, CADENAS provides the essential infrastructure for strategic parts management and electronic product catalogs. Tools like PARTdataManager and PURCHINEERING are critical for reducing part proliferation. CADENAS typically employs a Concurrent (Floating) licensing model managed by its own internal license service or the Licman manager, allowing seats to be shared across CAD workstations and purchasing departments.
The visibility gap
While the CADENAS license administration tools (within PARTadmin) allow for basic license depositing and status checks, they lack deep historical analytics. Administrators can see which licenses are currently “checked out,” but they cannot easily determine if a user is actively searching for components or if the application is simply idling in the background while the engineer works in a CAD system like NX, SOLIDWORKS, or Creo.
The “hidden cost” narrative
Budget leaks in CADENAS environments typically occur through “Redundant Seat Allocation.” Because CADENAS is a cross-functional tool used by both Engineering and Procurement, licenses are often over-provisioned to ensure “instant access” during critical design phases. This leads to artificial shortages and unnecessary purchases of additional seats for specialized interfaces or catalog access.
Quick summary: OpenLM for CADENAS
OpenLM empowers you to optimize your CADENAS investments by transforming raw license data into actionable management strategy.
- Track PARTsolutions activity: Monitor real-time usage across PARTdataManager, GEOsearch, and Classification modules.
- Identify idle seats: Automatically flag users who have a CADENAS license checked out but are not actively interacting with the software.
- Eliminate license denials: Use peak-usage heatmaps to right-size your license pool, ensuring designers are never blocked from the standard parts library.
- Optimize renewal agreements: Use 12-month historical data to negotiate your next CADENAS contract based on true concurrent demand.
- Automate compliance: Maintain an audit-ready trail of seat assignments to avoid surprises during vendor license reviews.
Comprehensive solution framework
The visibility layer
Gain full transparency into your CADENAS environment. See exactly who is active and which specific catalog interfaces are being utilized. This applies whether your team is centralized or distributed across global design and procurement centers.
The intelligence layer
Use CADENAS-specific usage analytics to determine your optimal seat count. By analyzing engagement patterns and session durations, you can measure the true ROI of your PARTsolutions investment and determine if you should adjust your license count before your next renewal.
The automation layer
Maximize the availability of your CADENAS license pool. OpenLM can automatically detect idle sessions and notify the user or administrator. In high-contention environments, this ensures that “license campers” do not block access to critical standard parts for the rest of the team.
How OpenLM monitors CADENAS
OpenLM uses a secure, non-intrusive approach to capture and monitor the license activity from the CADENAS environment.
Seamless integration
- Licman/Broker connectivity: For CADENAS environments using Licman, the OpenLM Broker queries the server locally to fetch real-time checkout and statistics.
- Process monitoring: OpenLM can monitor the active process on the workstation to verify if PARTdataManageris actively being used or just running in the background.
- Zero performance impact: Monitoring occurs at the system level, ensuring that the visual search and 3D data retrieval in CADENAS remain high-speed.
Strategic reporting and analytics
- Active vs. Idle tracking: Distinguish between an engineer actively sourcing a part and an application that was left open overnight.
- Cost center chargebacks: Assign CADENAS license costs to specific engineering projects or departments based on actual usage hours.
Strategic ROI and business value
Organizations using OpenLM for CADENAS license optimization often see significant reductions in their annual software spend.
- Procurement support: Use “actual activity” data to negotiate your next maintenance agreement instead of relying on estimated seat counts.
- Reduced downtime: Reclaim idle seats to allow immediate access for high-priority design tasks without buying new licenses.
- Improved data governance: Ensure your high-value parts management tools are being used consistently across the organization to prevent duplicate part creation.
