The Hidden Workforce Case Study
799 Operators. 252 Real Users.
How a 200-person automotive parts manufacturer discovered they were paying for 547 unused accounts.
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"The Email" — Panic
The notification arrives on a Tuesday morning. HR pulls the user list from SYSPRO. 799 operator accounts. The CFO does the mental math.
799 users × [your cost per user]/annum = [total annual cost]
The board meets. Voices rise. Talk of switching ERPs entirely. "Why are we paying for 800 people when we only have 200?" No one has the answer. The reseller quotes a Named Subscription migration based on the standard 2x multiplier — even that multi-x ratio doesn't save enough. Something is deeply wrong with the data.
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"The Archaeology" — Discovery
linqIQ begins the forensic audit. Layer by layer, the dormant operators are uncovered. It's archaeology, not just data analysis.
These accounts had never triggered a login event in years, or were system-generated integration points that never should have been Named Users.
127 ex-employees from the last 5 years, never removed from the system. Their shifts ended; their user IDs lingered. 89 duplicate accounts — shift workers who'd been given morning and afternoon IDs because the original provisioning process hadn't deduplicated them. 43 test and training accounts from implementations, never cleaned up. And 180 integration robots — automated jobs, middleware connectors, batch processes, and SYSPRO's own system accounts — provisioned as Named Users when they should have been service accounts.
The pattern emerges: over 5 years of organic growth, mergers, and system changes, the operator list had become a backlog of obsolete IDs. No one had audited it. No one had cleaned it. It was easier to let them sit than to maintain hygiene.
"The Reckoning" — The Truth
The real number emerges. Not 799. Not even 360 (those who'd logged in within 12 months). 252 genuinely needed Named Users, after removing duplicates, casuals sharing shifts, and integration accounts.
× [your cost]/annum
× [your cost]/annum
But the story doesn't end at cost savings. The P95 concurrency (peak simultaneous users during busy periods) was just 41. They'd never needed 799 licences. They'd never needed 360. They'd needed 252, and even that was a comfortable cushion above actual demand.
The CFO recalculates the board presentation. Instead of an 18-month ROI conversation, they're looking at capital freed today. Money they can invest in growth, or redirect to other digital initiatives.
"The Awakening" — The Real Power
With 252 clean, verified Named Users, something unexpected happened. They began activating modules they'd ignored for years.
48 modules. Fully licensed. Finally, worth exploring.
Manufacturing modules (BOM, MRP, WIP) they'd never activated. Quality Management (SQM), which they'd been doing in spreadsheets for three years. Contact Management (CMS), which they'd been paying separately for. Projects and Contracts. Enterprise Asset Management. They'd licensed all 48 modules, but treated SYSPRO like a single silo because the organisation had only ever seen the dormant accounts, not the real users.
Once the dust settled, with 252 properly licensed, fully supported users, they weren't cheaper — they were exponentially more valuable. Each real user suddenly had access to the full platform. Training budgets went down (fewer, cleaner accounts to maintain). Support tickets dropped (integration robots no longer generated phantom errors). And the supply chain, quality, and customer-facing workflows finally had their tools in the same system.
The CFO's significant savings became the CEO's war chest for the next three modules they'd never dared to enable.
Real Stories. Real Impact.
"We went in thinking we'd get a 10% discount if we were lucky. Finding 439 unused accounts meant we weren't just optimising — we were recovering millions in waste."
"Shift workers had two accounts. We thought it was normal. Turns out it's why our reconciliation always took an extra two days. The audit uncovered both the dormant accounts and the process gaps."
"I walked into the board with the blind quote at [full cost]. I walked out with proof we needed [audited cost]. The forensic analysis gave us credibility that complemented what the reseller already knew about our environment."
"We thought SYSPRO was maxed out. Once we cleaned the account database and enabled the 48 modules, it became the core system we should have been using all along."