Case Study: Chicago Public Schools achieves 30-second inventory responses and saves 192 FTE hours with Flexera

Chicago Public Schools Improves Productivity and Efficiency of Their Software Portfolio

Chicago Public Schools, the third-largest U.S. district with more than 600 schools serving ~400,000 students and 40,000 staff, struggled to understand and control its software footprint across 130,000 Windows devices. Relying on raw SCCM data required extensive manual normalization, so routine management queries could take about four hours each—roughly 200 staff hours a year—making application rationalization and cost-saving initiatives impractical for an already short-staffed IT team.

By deploying Flexera’s solution and its cloud Application Recognition Service, CPS gained a normalized inventory (discovering over 29,000 application versions versus an expected 5,000), fast query capability, and clear usage data tied to users and sites. Results included query times reduced to ~30 seconds, savings of over 192 FTE hours annually, identification and remediation of end-of-life software (e.g., Internet Explorer on 6,000 machines) to lower security risk, and better-informed decisions on consolidation, purchases and vendor contracts.

Chicago Public Schools

Paul Valente

Managed Services Support Lead