Download PDF
from the Factory to the User: Streamlining Computer Delivery Processes Using 1E Shopping and SCCM
Technology Category
- Functional Applications - Remote Monitoring & Control Systems
- Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
- Functional Applications - Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP)
Applicable Industries
- Professional Service
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Facility Management
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Remote Asset Management
- Inventory Management
Services
- System Integration
- Software Design & Engineering Services
The Challenge
The environmental firm faced significant challenges with its imaging depots, which were designed to build and distribute computers to users across the company. While the depots provided excellent customer service, they were not sustainable from a business perspective. The process was labor-intensive, costly, and time-consuming, leading to significant backups and inefficiencies. Storage was another major issue, as maintaining a large quantity of equipment at non-warehouse locations was impractical. The firm needed a more efficient and cost-effective solution to streamline the computer delivery process without compromising the quality of service.
About The Customer
The customer is an environmental firm based in the United States, employing over 1,000 people. The firm is dedicated to providing high-quality environmental services and has a strong focus on leveraging technology to improve operational efficiency. The company had been using various 1E products for over a decade, including Nomad and NightWatchman, and had been considering 1E Shopping for several years. The firm decided to create imaging depots to service its users for desktop and laptop delivery, aiming to provide fully configured computers with all necessary software and accessories pre-installed. However, the depots proved to be unsustainable due to high costs and inefficiencies.
The Solution
The firm implemented a new solution that involved shipping computers directly from the manufacturer to the user and providing a self-service process for users to complete the build of their own computers. This process leveraged 1E Shopping to automate the ordering and approval process, allowing users to request the software they needed with all approvals handled automatically. The task sequence for computer delivery was simplified to include dynamic patch and driver injection, ensuring that any model of computer could be built without issues at the factory. The solution also included a process for automating the backup and restore of user data during computer refresh scenarios, using 1E Nomad and USMT. This end-to-end automated process significantly reduced costs and manual labor while maintaining high-quality service for end users.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Factor-y S.r.l. – Establishes a cost-effective, security-rich development environment with SoftLayer technology
Factor-y S.r.l., a web portal developer, was faced with the challenge of migrating its development infrastructure to a reliable cloud services provider with highly responsive technical support. The company needed a solution that would not only provide a secure and reliable environment but also support its expansion by providing resources to create and deliver innovative offerings.
Case Study
UBM plc: Taking the pulse of the business and engaging employees with a far-reaching strategic transformation
UBM, a leading global events business, was undergoing a significant strategic transformation named 'Events First'. As part of this transformation, the company was preparing to complete the largest acquisition in its history - Advanstar, a US-based events and marketing services business valued at more than USD970m. The company faced the risk of human capital flight if it was unable to effectively engage top talent with the new strategic direction. UBM needed to make significant structural, process and systems changes, uniting its previously autonomous regional businesses. The challenge was to ensure all of its employees were engaged and aligned with the new future vision.
Case Study
Darwin Ecosystem: Accelerating discovery and insight through cutting-edge big data and cognitive technologies
Darwin Ecosystem was founded with a unique vision of harnessing chaos theory mathematics to uncover previously hidden connections in unstructured data. The company’s algorithms can look at all the data generated by any source (such as news, RSS feeds and Twitter), and analyze how a specific set of concepts within that data are evolving over time. This is particularly valuable in situations such as business and competitive intelligence, social research, brand monitoring, legal discovery, risk mitigation and even law enforcement. A common problem in these areas is that a regular web search will only turn up the all-time most popular answers to a given question – but what the expert researcher is actually interested in is the moment-tomoment evolution of the data available on that topic. Darwin’s algorithm is computationally intensive, and the sources of data it correlates can be vast. To bring its benefits to a larger commercial audience, Darwin needed to find a way to make it scale.
Case Study
Wittmann EDV-Systeme launches IT monitoring services
Small and medium-sized businesses often lack the know-how and resources required for thorough IT system monitoring. Wittmann EDV-Systeme wanted to launch a solution to plug the gap – enabling it to improve its own competitiveness and that of its customers. IT landscapes are becoming ever more complex and outsourcing is gaining popularity, IT systems must nonetheless remain easy-to-use and extremely reliable at all times. Automated, round-the-clock system monitoring therefore represents an immensely valuable proposition for companies: downtime for business-critical applications can be avoided, and IT systems remain available at all times.
Case Study
Zend accelerates, simplifies PHP development
Zend Technologies, a major contributor to the PHP open source community, needed to keep pace with emerging trends such as mobility, agile development, application lifecycle management and continuous delivery. The company needed to provide the right tools to the worldwide community of PHP developers. The challenge was to support enterprise-class capabilities from end to end, including mobile, compliance and security. The pace of business required developers to show results fast across a variety of devices without compromising quality or security.
Case Study
Delivering modern data protection with cloud scale backup from Cobalt Iron and IBM
Organizations are struggling to modernize their legacy data protection environments in the face of growing demands around new infrastructure, new applications, and budget consolidation. Virtualization and modern application development processes have significantly outgrown legacy backup architectures. In response, infrastructure teams have created multiple backup solution types to handle the varying SLAs (performance, scale, cost) required by their business sponsors. However, the sheer number and variety of solutions in this uncontrolled expansion creates huge amounts of work, threatening to overwhelm the IT team in many organizations. Today, developers may add new applications and virtual server instances by the hundreds per day without accounting for the restrictions of the existing backup infrastructure. They leverage the cloud for immediate compute and storage resources, yet rarely communicate succinctly with corporate IT to ensure that the appropriate data protection services are in place.
