Customer Solution Case Study
/ Commercial Vehicle Dealer Relieves IT Strain with Cloud-Based Solution
Overview
Country or Region:The Netherlands
Industry:Transportation and Logistics
Customer Profile
Truckland is a commercial vehicle dealer based in the Netherlands. The company sells and services a wide range of vehicles and brands, from small vans to semi-trailer trucks.
Business Situation
If there’s any downside to this growing company’s success, it’s increasing IT needs. Truckland’s three sister companies and 11 total locations share one small, centralized IT department—a group that struggles to keep up with demanding needs for email service and support.
Solution
Truckland’s IT partner, Wortell, suggested Microsoft Office 365, a solution for email, calendaring, collaboration, and conferencing services, as well as web-based versions of the popular Microsoft Office programs.
Benefits
- Cloud solution saves €21,000 on hardware
- 20% fewer IT support calls
- Uptime increased by 10%
Fredo Lekkerkerker ICT Manager, Truckland
Truckland, a commercial vehicle dealer, is a growing companywith increasingIT needs. Its small, centralized IT department wanted to offload email hosting to a reliable, cloud-based service, and Microsoft Office 365 gave the company 99.9% guaranteed uptime. It also provided more benefits to the company’s end-users, who now enjoy larger mailboxes and access via their mobile devices, and can provide better service to customers as a result.
Situation
Truckland prides itself on helping its customers find just the right solution to fit their needs. This commercial vehicle dealer, based in the Netherlands, sells and services nearly any type of vehicle, from smaller vans that move easily through narrow city streets, to full-size semi-trailer trucks. For every vehicle Truckland offers, the company also provides a range of brands, so that customers always get what they’re looking for.
If there’s any downside to this growing company’s success, it’s increasing IT needs. Truckland’s three sister companies and 11 total locations share one small, centralized IT department—a group that struggles to keep up with demanding needs for email service and support. The company’s employees rely heavily on email for communication within the company, as well as with customers. Uptime is vital to providing the high level of customer service Truckland wants to achieve.
“Our IT department is rather small,” says Fredo Lekkerkerker, ICT Managerat Truckland. “Supporting our email service is becoming more difficult as we grow, especially when we consider the work it would take to support an on-premise solution.”
With evolving technology and a growing need for email storage, Truckland had considered outsourcing IT to a data center, but decided that its IT department would still have to manage too much of the work. Instead, Truckland chose to migrate services to the cloud, with the goal of lightening the overall workload for its IT staff.
Truckland needed a solution that included a strong email platform and offered excellent reliability, plus easy remote access. The solution itself had to require little to no management from the company’s overworked IT staff. At the same time, the cloud-based service had to provide value to the company’s end-users, Truckland’s employees.
Solution
Because Truckland knows how important it is to find just the right solution—something the company does for its customers every day—its IT staff shopped around and compared cloud-based services. Its IT solutions provider, Wortell, suggested Microsoft Office 365, a solution for email, calendaring, collaboration, and conferencing services, as well as web-based versions of the popular Microsoft Office programs.
Truckland’s IT department was relieved to hand over management of the company’s email to Office 365, which guarantees a 99.9% service uptime. Plus, Office 365 features industry-leading, always-up-to-date anti-virus and anti-spam solutions, providing a safe environment with no extra effort from the IT department.
“When our IT staff was managing email, they would have to do specific updates and support to keep everything running. With Office 365, that won’t be the case anymore,”Lekkerkerker says. With more time free, the IT department can focus on other important tasks.
Office 365 offers more than just email, as well as more features than other cloud-based solutions. With Microsoft Exchange Online, each user gets 25 GB of mailbox storage and the ability to send attachments up to 25 MB in size, which is a big bonus for Truckland’s storage-hungry employees.Employees can also access Office 365 from a variety of mobile devices, improving their ability to respond to customers no matter where they are.
In addition, the Office 365 monthly subscription paradigm makes it easy to predict IT costs, while allowing Truckland to phase out its hardware and software licenses. In comparison, on-premise support would probably require three servers, which could run the company about €7,000 each.
Benefits
Office 365 has relieved the strain on Truckland’s IT department while increasing uptime by about 10% and offering even more benefits to end-users. Plus, the company can better forecast what it will spend on IT.
Less Strain on IT
Truckland’s IT department previously spent four hours weekly managing the company’s email and responding to 500 related support calls each year. Now the IT staff expects to see about 20% fewer support calls. “Office 365 enables us to conserve IT hours and increase the quality of service we provide to our staff. They, in turn, can offer better service to Truckland’s customers,” Lekkerkerker says.
Better User Experience
When comparing cloud-based services, Lekkerkerker wanted to be sure that Truckland’s employees would have positive experiences. With Office 365, Truckland employees need no additional training, since they are already familiar with Microsoft services and applications.
Access from Mobile Devices
Before implementing Office 365, Truckland’s IT department couldn’t support email on all the different types of mobile devices employees were using. Now, end-users have easy access to email, contacts, and calendars, and Microsoft SharePoint Online provides fast access to documents on nearly any device, including Windows Phone, iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry.
Predictable Costs
Truckland appreciates that the per-user monthly subscription makes it easy to calculate how much Truckland will spend. Plus, the company won’t have to invest in servers, backup hardware, and software required for on-premise email hosting.
Office 365 has relieved a huge strain on the IT department and presented a more valuable user experience to all of the company’s employees. The solution boosts uptime and frees up staff to do more work that profits the company.“Now that we’re using Office 365, we expect to see a more stable email environment with fewer support calls to our IT department,” Lekkerkerker says.
Microsoft Office 365
Microsoft Office 365 brings together cloud versions of our most trusted communications and collaboration products—Microsoft SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Lync Online—with the latest version of our Office desktop suite and companion web applications for businesses of all sizes.
Office 365 helps save time and money, and it frees up valued resources. Simple to use and easy to administer, it is financially backed by a service level agreement that guarantee 99 percent reliability. Office 365 features robust security, IT-level phone support, geo-redundancy, disaster recovery, and the business-class privacy controls and standards that you expect from a world-class service provider.
For more information about Microsoft Office 365, go to: