As staff numbers and roles fluctuate across businesses and industries, it is of great importance to efficiently manage and allocate both Frontline and Enterprise worker licenses.
Merlin Entertainments, with brands including SEA LIFE, Madame Tussauds, LEGOLAND, The London Eye and Alton Towers, is the world’s second largest operator by number of visitors with 114 sites, 12 hotels and four holiday villages in 23 countries across four continents.
With a high rotation of staff, the number of employees requiring Frontline worker licenses at the various sites around the world for Merlin varied considerably dependant on the time of year. This issue had become so prevalent that it had built a Power BI based reporting solution internally to give visibility of the licenses being used at a given time. However, this was a very manual process resulting in frequent errors and time-consuming work.
Clobba License Adoption is an easy-to-use tool that delivers detailed analysis of the consumption of all M365 licenses. Delivered as a SaaS solution from Clobba’s Azure clouds around the world, it delivers insights into the ongoing use of the various license types including Enterprise (E5, E3, Phone System) and Frontline (F1, F3) workers. It ensures that the licenses allocated are relevant for the user requirements and they are being adopted and consumed correctly. Visibility of unallocated licenses, duplicate license types and disabled Entra ID users ensures Merlin is optimising its investment in M365.
Through its intuitive and user friendly interface, Clobba delivered instant visibility and management of the movement of Frontline worker licenses, significantly reducing the time spent on the licence management process and removed the element of risk. Unused licenses – or those allocated to a disabled Entra ID user – could be reassigned and provisioned in a seamless and efficient manner. The results were instant and the biggest win for Merlin was the reduction in the costs associated with Frontline workers ensuring it got the maximum ROI from Microsoft. For customers with large deployments of Enterprise licenses the same methodology would apply.
UC Architect at Merlin, Paul Cornish, said that Thorpe Park isn’t open at the start of the year, so the staff and license count rotates and changes.
“Clobba Licence Adoption showed me when those users have left, that they’re either disabled or not using the licence anymore meaning I can reassign to other users,” Mr Cornish said.
“In addition I could see whether an Enterprise Voice License was required or not and then whether we assigned it to our users, saving money – a lot of money – by not having to buy licences or roll out phones that were required or not required in the parks.”
To find out how the Clobba suite can help your organisation, visit www.codesoftware.net/au.
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