Free Edition Industry: IT | Case Study
MothersonSumi INfotech and Designs Ltd. (MIND) is a Capability Maturity Model (CMM) Level 5-certified company that provides end-to-end IT solutions to the Samvardhana Motherson Group (SMG) and other customers globally. SMG is spread globally with nearly 6,500 systems. The services that MIND provides are application development, IT infrastructure, consultancy, system integration, testing and maintenance. To provide better services, MIND wanted to standardize and centralize its operations for SMG.
MINDS's IT team has four units; each assigned to specific areas of work. The front L1 team caters to all IT needs of the customer; the technical team, which operates from the back office, works directly for any emergency cases; the functional team operates for different IT services such as AD (Active Directory), Exchange, Systems, and Network Management; and the project team provides services for new IT setups or to replace older setups. The team follows the ITIL guidelines for its everyday IT tasks. The issue tickets are regenerated, assigned, and queued until resolution.
In general, IT operations in such a huge setup can make monitoring and managing desktops highly complicated. MIND's earlier attempts at implementing a centralized solution proved futile because of manual processes. The IT team decided that it was time to overhaul the existing solution if they wanted seamless and centralized IT management.
The task at hand was phenomenal, as the site engineers operated from remote locations and were using heterogeneous tools for asset management and other IT operations. The IT personnel were visiting remote sites or workstations to troubleshoot and collect asset information. When the IT team decided to overhaul the IT operations, they opted for a desktop management solution.
MIND was using different legacy tools for software deployment, asset management, and screen sharing. The company decided to centralize the setup at one go and consolidate the tool at a central location to achieve a higher return on investment (ROI).
The IT team conducted a thorough study of the various desktop management solutions available in the market. They needed a solution that had a smooth learning curve and was easy to use and scalable. The team evaluated several solutions from different vendors in the market. For more than 8 weeks, all of the vendors' tools were deployed live and studied by the team. They also built a comprehensive matrix for every single vendor and evaluated the solutions on parameters such as current requirement, scalability, customization, user friendliness, ease of deployment, and cost-effectiveness. Ultimately, Endpoint Central aced the evaluation because it had a smooth learning curve and could be deployed quickly. MIND deployed Endpoint Central in less than 4 weeks for capturing the assets inventory.
After evaluating Endpoint Central, Sharad Madan, the Service Delivery Manager at MIND, said, "I would say the main advantage of ManageEngine Endpoint Central (formerly Desktop Central) is its ease-of-use and deployment in terms of time and cost. In an IT environment that is as dynamic as ours, if the deployment takes between six months and a year, we are actually downgrading our solution's efficiency by 20-30% during that time. Typically, the life span of a solution is 3-4 years and if you are spending 6-8 months deploying it, then actually you are losing that much time in the solution's life cycle."
Sharad continued, "In fact, to work on the solutions available in the market, you need specialized skills due to complexity involved. They cannot be readily used by mid-tier IT resources and hence, you need specialized training and skill enhancement. With Endpoint Central (formerly Desktop Central), you can train an admin and expect him to be ready on the field within a couple of days or a week."
It's been quite some time since MIND made the decision to deploy Endpoint Central. The company uses Endpoint Central primarily for asset management, software deployment, and remote troubleshooting tasks. Endpoint Central helped the IT team streamline the desktop management tasks and helped them gain control over the entire desktop ecosystem. Now, their support engineers provide better support from central locations, because Endpoint Central eliminates truck rolls.
MIND uses a Microsoft standard operating environment for desktops and laptops. Endpoint Central controls this operating system now. The team can now control installations, security package deployment, and capture the resources information for better capacity management for all IT users.
Endpoint Central's user access control and customization features are used extensively by MIND. The IT team can easily restrict employees from deploying any application updates from original equipment manufacturing or third-party publishers to protect company data from malware or virus attacks.
With their project team constantly setting up desktops and applications, Endpoint Central's reports help teams ensure thorough inspection before execution. Endpoint Central allows the teams to perform basic SQL operations to execute custom reports, which help immensely in inventory management. Reports on inventory and configurations are published on the dashboard to enable effective business decisions. Endpoint Central helps in fetching asset information such as hardware and software along with the inventory procurement feed.
Earlier, at MIND, company-wide MS Office deployment was a time-consuming process because it was through a PC and took over a month. Today, the company plans to deploy 2013 MS Office on almost 40-50% of the systems in just one night by using Endpoint Central.
Moreover, the company no longer depends on site engineers for details on asset management and software deployment. All data is available at just a click of a button because data collection, MIS generation, and alerts to site engineers are all automated by Endpoint Central.
"The ROI for MIND has been in terms of effort and peace of mind," said Sharad. "The data on the Endpoint Central (formerly Desktop Central) console is reliable and dependable, and manual collection and analysis is almost non-existent. Obviously, the extensive report generation capabilities of Endpoint Central (formerly Desktop Central) have helped us achieve higher effectiveness."
MIND is a top-tier CMM level 5 company that provides end-to-end IT solutions providing services to SMG and other global customers. The services includes application development, integration, testing, and maintenance services. It also caters to a diverse set of industry verticals, including market leaders from the government, automotive, manufacturing, health care, travel, and education sectors.