Reference story - Nisa-Today's
The Situation
Nisa-Today’s is the UK’s leading member-owned organisation,providing benefits to independent retailers and wholesalers in food and drink markets, with a turnover in excess of £1bn and a £5.75bn wholesale buying arm. The mutual group is entirely owned by its trading members and represents 5,000 stores and 270 wholesalers across the UK (including Northern Ireland) and the Channel Islands.
Nisa-Today is supported by a centralised buying, marketing and distribution system, operating from the organisation’s Member Support Centre headquartered in Scunthorpe, with an ambient operation in the same location and two temperature-controlled depots in Stoke-on-Trent and Harlow. This group also provides its members with full central office back-up incorporating cutting-edge ordering systems and planogram services for store merchandising. The Member Support Centre team requires access to these systems at all times and will field on average, 350 member enquiries a day.
The challenge: Supporting secure access to applications while lowering IT operating costs
As a mutual group, keeping central operation costs, including IT, as low as possible is a top business priority. Nisa-Today’s wanted to reduce the cost of managing its desktop environment by 25% but did not want to affect the productivity of its 195 users based at the Member Support Centre. Trevor Guerin, IT Outsourcing Manager looked for a solution that would allow many of the company’s desktop support tasks to be centralised and automated, allowing it to drive down the cost of managing its user environment. At the same time, Nisa-Today’s wanted to provide tighter security around user access.
‘One of the biggest challenges for IT is controlling the cost and security of the desktop. From configuration to application deployment, the investment of time and resource needed to maintain application access is considerable with a PC environment. Our IT support function was consumed by firefighting individual desktop issues. We wanted to reduce this so that we could more tightly control the cost of operations and free up more of our time to focus on innovation,” said Guerin. “We also wanted to enhance security across our IT operations. To do this we needed to restrict the openness of the PCs installed without taking away any functionality for the user.”
Working with its IT services partner, SquareOne, Nisa-Today’s selected RES Software’s PowerFuse and Wisdom as its desktop and infrastructure management solution.
RES PowerFuse provides Nisa-Today’s with a powerful workspace management solution that allows the organisation to have full control over user access regardless of whether applications are installed locally on the PC or delivered virtually from the data centre. Since its installation, PowerFuse has automated 30% of the core desktop maintenance tasks. To provide this level of automation in any other way would have taken the use of multiple software and network management products. With PowerFuse, the deployment of software updates and reconfiguration of desktops, which used to take days can now be handled in seconds from a single console. The team has been able to reduce the time it spends in the field fire fighting desktop problems by 25%.
In addition to being able to deploy software updates up to 10 times faster, Nisa-Today’s has also increased security around the desktop by managing where users can save their data and controlling what can be downloaded.
“Before users would save to their hard drives, which increased the risk of data loss if anything happens to the desktop hardware,” commented Darren Scarratt, Nisa-Today’s network manager. “With RES PowerFuse, we can ensure that users save directly to the central drives which are automatically backed up.”
Another challenge that has been addressed by PowerFuse is the downloading of unauthorised software as Scarratt explained, “Users will inevitably follow dialogue popups when a software update is needed. The risk is that unauthorised software is downloaded or creates a conflict with the installed software. With RES we can avoid this situation happening as it intercepts to ensure that software updates are automatically administered and rolled-out to all users. This is a plus point not only for the IT team but for the user too.”
“One of the biggest benefits of using PowerFuse and one that is visible to our Member Support Centre team, is the ability for users to work from any machine and still have access to their own personal settings,” added Scarratt. “Before if a user’s PC was down they were out of action until the desktop was fixed which affected productivity. Now in the event of a desktop problem they can easily move to a free workstation, logging on to use their own applications.”
Greater control over IT assets
With PowerFuse, Nisa-Today’s has greater control over IT asset management and compliance reporting. The management software allows the company to track the use of its software licenses. By monitoring actual usage patterns and auditing their existing software Nisa-Today’s has reduced licensing costs by 10 - 15%.
RES Wisdom IT change automation software enables Nisa-Today’s to minimise the time spent on both recurring and unique changes to desktops and servers. RES Wisdom offers a uniform solution to routine but complex tasks. Labour intensive changes that normally take hours are now completed automatically in seconds from a single console.
RES Wisdom takes minutes to install on the administrator’s workstation. From there it can be deployed quickly across the network to all the Microsoft workstations and servers in the organisation, regardless of location. Nisa-Today’s can orchestrate the roll out of Operating System updates, patches, hot fixes and install/uninstall applications networkwide, and provide easy scheduling of registry setting modifications, service changes, event log monitoring and disk space usage.
“One of the biggest benefits of using RES PowerFuse and Wisdom is the ability for our technical specialists to manage Nisa-Today’s user and server environments from anywhere. This capability was particularly invaluable when one of our senior members of the team couldn’t be based in the office for several months and had to work from home. It would have been a real challenge to find a temporary cover with the skills and level of knowledge we needed. With RES we can manage the entire user environment remotely, which enabled our senior team member to work as she would in the office
from home.
Managing fat, thin and virtual
infrastructures Wisdom also supports the company’s IT consolidation plans, which have been accelerated using server virtualisation. The company has virtualised its entire server environment using VMware and uses Wisdom to deploy client applications from its virtual servers in a few hours. Before Wisdom was installed this process took days to complete. Nisa-Today’s see its RES PowerFuse and Wisdom management system as integral to the development of its IT infrastructure. Its ability to manage user and server environments regardless of whether computing models being deployed are fat, thin or virtual, provides the company with flexibility around the technology choices it makes. Nisa-Today’s knows that it has the ability to have single point control regardless of how it evolves its computing environment.
"With RES PowerFuse, we can ensure that users save directly to the central drives which are automatically backed up.”
Darren Scarratt, Nisa-Today’s network manager, UK