Free Edition Industry: Mining | Case Study
Also Available in PDF format (547 KB)
The company is one of the long-standing coal mining institution in Australia that got listed in the year 1904. It’s business interests and operations are coal mining, exploration, port operation, oil, agriculture, innovative technologies, and investment.
Their major market relies in supplying more than 90% of their minerals to export markets, predominantly in the Asia Pacific region.
With such mammoth operations handled it is quite a daunting task for the IT team to perform Desktop Management operations. Since those Desktop Computers are linchpin for the employees to perform back end tasks such as preparing documents, creating and storing invoice transactions, and many such operations on daily basis.
The IT team, small in size, has a huge responsibility to ensure that there is no hiccup in the desktop performance and fulfill user requests. Their manual way of executing tasks such as patch updates or pushing software application became cumbersome. There was no appropriate tool to scrutinize desktop operations, maintaining all the consoles manually became a painstaking task.
“We are very small team, we have an in-house department, which consists of eight of us. Most of them look into ERP and SAP solutions but for the hardware network support side of things there’s only three of us, that’s the biggest challenge,” says System and Network Administrator of IT division.
The organization is distributed around six different sites geographically and such a small team to manage and troubleshoot systems has become complicated. “Whenever there is a requirement to troubleshoot systems at remote location or adding extra software to client systems, it has resulted in IT personnel constantly moving from one place to another and they have always had to be on the ground” explains administrator.
Soon, the IT team realized that if they continue with the existing procedure it might hamper their time and effort.
Clearly, the company needed a comprehensive solution and they had a checklist of “Things to be Present” in the expected software such as patch management, Software Management, High efficient reports. Moreover the tool should be an easy-to-use software and highly capable of accomplishing desktop management tasks successfully.
Fortunately for the IT team they were using ManageEngine's OpManager for monitoring IT networks and ServiceDesk Plus for tracking user requests. Administrator’s experience and trust with these two products from ManageEngine made him look at a Desktop Management solution within the ManageEngine family. When he tried and tested Endpoint Central for their network it become an easy choice.
“We started using OpManager originally for keeping tabs on our switches and for all our network monitoring solutions. Then we bought Servicedesk Plus to manage all our help desk requests and we are using it for a long time now that’s been really good for keeping tabs. When it came to Desktop Management solution we turned our eyes on the ManageEngine website and our search came to an end discovering Desktop Central(currently Endpoint Central)” declares Administrator.
Of all the features available in Endpoint Central the IT team uses Patch Management, Software application and Reports mostly for Bulk Deployment and IT audit purposes. This helps them in improving IT operations and reducing time and efforts.
“Desktop Central(currently Endpoint Central) helped us in reducing lot of time with its ease of use and doesn’t require Rocket Science in using the product, previously we could not do so many updates and physically run around and manage machines one by one” mentions Administrator.
On an average, the IT team deploys 119 applications and the challenge was to ensure that the deployment has to be accomplished without disturbing the end user. This feat was executed successfully with Endpoint Central silent software installation facility.
“Previously we deployed applications with the help of windows configurations and we could do things manually back then but now it is not practical since the scope of managing desktops has increased in numbers. With Desktop Central(currently Endpoint Central), we were able to push applications such as .net, flash updates, msi packages and whole bunch of things and it can work in the background in the users system, when you push out a job, it keeps trying, till it finishes the job which is a really good thing” explains administrator.
"The ROI (Return on Investment) was significant. When we purchased the tool I had certain calculation and I now definitely say that Desktop Central(currently Endpoint Central) has helped in realizing around 70% of the time reduction. The best thing about Desktop Central(currently Endpoint Central) is it helped me in downsizing the time and efforts” declares administrator.
“The beauty of Desktop Central(currently Endpoint Central) is that it is an ideal solution for any industry that requires desktop management. It belongs to the ManageEngine family which has a good price point and a quick responsive support team. Desktop Central(currently Endpoint Central) will aid in addressing the challenges in the Desktop Management space pertaining to any industry of any size”, concludes System administrator.
Endpoint Central is a complete Desktop and Mobile Device Management software that provides software deployment, enterprise mobile management, patch management, service pack installation, asset management, remote control, configurations, system tools, user logon reports, and Active Directory reports. It is a network-neutral solution that can be used to manage desktops in Active Directory, workgroups, and Novell eDirectory. It can manage computers in multiple domains and across a WAN. Endpoint Central helps achieve compliance with standards such as SOX, HIPAA, and PCI. It also provides a bundle of useful reports to meet compliance audits.