How Flex helps Nippon Koei maximize productivity in their business

When experts from Nippon Koei were introduced to our initial Flex offering, they were looking for a solution to increase their productivity. With so many projects in their pipeline, they wanted an option that would help them work smarter and stay ahead of the competition. They did not, however, conceive of the massive impact that Flex would have on their business. Looking at the past four years, their token purchase volume has increased by 150% while their annual contract value (ACV) has jumped by 210%. Within 2023 alone, Nippon Koei has already spent over $1M USD on 750,000 tokens for its 1000+ users. What drove the Group to invest so heavily in Flex? To help us answer this question, I reached out to Yumi Inada, sales representative for the Group, to break down the key benefits that drove Nippon Koei to invest heavily in Flex.

Time efficiency was a key driver for Nippon Koei’s decision to put users on Flex. With so many employees working on different projects, the experts wanted to make it easy for their users to access the products they needed without having to rely on its technology managers to manually reassign access. Nippon Koei told Yumi that both their technology managers and its users saved countless hours with easy access through Flex. In light of work-from-home mandates and office closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic, manually managing access for users all around the world became inefficient and time consuming. However, Nippon Koei’s technology managers were able to provide instant product access to all their users with Flex, allowing them to bypass any slowdown in productivity. Despite having thousands of users on Autodesk products globally, Nippon Koei was able to adapt its in-office workflow to a remote process without any trouble. While its competitors struggled to provide product access to their newly remote workforce, Nippon Koei took advantage of Flex to wisely save time by reducing active user management and increasing efficiency for users.

Nippon Koei made sure to waste no time when it came to maximizing the new Usage Report and all the usage reporting features the Group's Autodesk Account. Its experts utilize usage reporting to identify their power users, narrowing in on the usage of specialized products with a steeper learning curve, such as Civil 3D and BIM. The addition of the new Usage Report page has allowed them to analyze the data of their users more efficiently than ever, so they can better understand who their product experts are. Once they narrow down their list of power users, they run an analysis to better understand the skill set of their users, identify their experts for promotions, and leverage specialized knowledge to train more users and increase the expertise of their workforce.

As BIM advisors to the Japanese government, the experts at Nippon Koei maintain their industry leadership by harnessing the latest technologies available. After their first purchase of 500K tokens in 2020, they instructed their users to take full advantage of the many products included with Flex. Their 655 users were able to discover new tools to improve their work after exploring 30 products in the first year. Seeing the impact that Flex had on their performance, Nippon Koei expanded access to 929 users. The impact of more users on Flex combined with the discovery of new tools propelled Nippon Koei to a creative high during their highest months of token usage. Nippon Koei was so satisfied with the performance of its users that it ultiamately made several more token purchases than originally planned to keep the momentum going. It was pleasantly surprised to learn that flexible access was the spark for creative brilliance within the company. Flex equipped users with the right tools to improve their work.

Yumi noted that Nippon Koei was able to streamline procurement by managing both Flex and Subscription. Nippon Koei takes advantage of discounted subscription prices for AutoCAD LT in Japan while simplifying the management of all its other Autodesk products with Flex. Accustomed to the headache of having to co-term every time it needed to make a purchase, Nippon Koei was delighted to discover how streamlined the procurement process was for Flex. The Group’s experts loved the ease of purchasing additional tokens whenever they needed. The accessibility has proved especially handy for them as they scale their Flex usage. Flex and Subscription work hand in hand to allow Nippon Koei to maximize cost savings without complicating product management.

From her experience working with Nippon Koei, Yumi emphasized the importance of reminding larger customers that Flex has unforeseen benefits for subsidiary management. She shared that her customers are always excited to hear about new opportunities to improve their operational efficiency, especially if they have numerous subsidiaries to manage. As it can get challenging for customers to maintain product access across multiple subsidiaries, Flex allows them to manage their products together so they can better maximize their spend and simplify procurement. Managing Flex centrally allows customers to ensure that every subsidiary stays efficient with immediate product access and no downtime. It is also easier to centrally track token usage for all their subsidiaries and ensure no tokens go to waste. “With access to one centralized pool of tokens, customers often have a better experience managing Flex than subscription across subsidiaries,” Yumi notes. “It can very quickly become time consuming to actively manage them separately and ensure each subsidiary always has the exact number of subscriptions they need. Flex removes the complexity of active management while making it easy to track token usage so they can easily add more tokens whenever they run low.”

For industry leaders like Nippon Koei, Flex demonstrates that Autodesk is willing to innovate alongside them while they leverage our products to produce impactful change.