Irish Food producer reduces costs and improves employee productivity by replacing Citrix with PowerTerm WebConnect
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Industry
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Food Production
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Customer
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Foyle Food Production
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PowerTerm® WebConnect RemoteView
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Challenges
- Reduce the complexity associated with managing remote access systems
- Reduce the total cost of IT ownership
- Make remote access systems easier for employees to use
- Reduce IT expenditure while maintaining service quality and remote working
Solution
- Deploy Ericom PowerTerm WebConnect Remote View
Benefits
- Easier system management, resulting in tasks being completed 60-80% more quickly
- Employee productivity gains with faster response times
- £5,000 savings from reduced hardware requirements
- Increased number of users per server
- Return on investment in just six months
- A secure, reliable and straight-forward system for users
- Strong application performance
- WebConnect is much easier to manage and control compared to Citrix
"WebConnect is much easier to manage and control compared to Citrix"
John Magennis,
Group IT Manager, Foyle Food Group
Background
Foyle Food Group has been operating for over 40 years and provides quality cuts of beef, lamb and pork to some of the world's largest food retailers across Europe, processing in excess of 650,000 animals per year. It has over 750 employees based on five sites across Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Like all successful businesses, it has to closely monitor its operating costs and pursues opportunities to improve efficiency.
"We operate in a very competitive, high volume, low margin market," says John Magennis, Group IT Manager at Foyle Food Group. "Operational efficiency really matters." All of the company's business decisions are subject to close financial scrutiny and the proposed investment in the Ericom product was no exception.
A growing number of remote workers
Foyle Food Group needed to improve access to core business applications for a growing number of remote workers. Many employees, including the management team, needed to be able to work from multiple locations. "Because we are a multi-site operation, some of our directors and senior managers move between sites almost daily," explains Magennis. In addition, the company had a requirement to give remote access to users requiring access from home, to include evening and weekend access.
The company's IT and technical support team also needed to be able to access core applications remotely, so that they could provide out-of-hours IT and technical service from home, in the event of a systems problem. "We needed to be able to provide distinct groups of users with structured, stable and secure access to core business applications," says Magennis.
At the time, Foyle Food Group had a Citrix platform for remote access, but the company's IT department was struggling with it. "It was proving difficult and cumbersome to provide remote access using our existing Citrix systems," recalls Magennis. "It can be a difficult package to manage and administer, in our experience."
A list of important criteria
Foyle Food Group started to look around for a viable alternative to Citrix. It had a number of key criteria, and at the top of this list was the need for improved manageability. The company wanted to be able to very quickly make certain applications available for remote access and had to select a solution that would be much easier for its IT team to manage, administer and deploy.
At the same time, however, Foyle Food Group also needed a solution that was affordable. Magennis explains: "In the current economic climate, and with the ongoing annual costs associated with using Citrix, we wanted to find something that would reduce our overall costs of ownership."
Finally – and perhaps most importantly – Foyle Food Group had to ensure that its new application was easy for its employees to use. "We wanted to improve the overall reliability of our remote access system and make it very straight-forward for users to access the business applications that they need," Magennis says.
Foyle Food Group was introduced to Ericom by an IT support organisation, which had previous experience of the food company's IT environment. "We were very surprised by the overall functionality offered by Ericom's PowerTerm WebConnect product," says Magennis. "It seemed to be and application that was much easier to manage."
A low-cost alternative to Citrix
Prior to making the decision to replace its existing Citrix system with a solution from Ericom, Foyle Food Group prepared a detailed cost benefit analysis, which was then presented to the company's board of directors. "We found that it was more cost effective for us to move to the Ericom application, than it was for us to upgrade our existing Citrix application and renew to the latest Citrix license," says Magennis.
Foyle Food Group purchased 50 user licenses for PowerTerm WebConnect Remote View, a solution that provides users with secure remote access to centrally stored applications. The implementation of the product took less time than the company expected. "The implementation was completed in just a couple of hours much to the surprise of the IT Department," says Magennis.
Through the deployment of PowerTerm WebConnect, Foyle Food Group was able to reduce the number of servers from four to one. As the business needed to upgrade its servers, the purchase cost of three servers was removed. "We saved around £5,000 by not replacing all of the old servers," says Magennis. "And in moving to one central server, instead of four servers, we did not notice any reduced systems performance."
Two employees from Foyle Food Group attended a two-day System Administration training course with Ericom to help them get up and running with the product. "The trainer was fully up to speed on the product and other similar systems," recalls Magennis. "He was able to discuss issues confidently and competently."
A return on investment in just six months
Foyle Food Group likes the flexibility of PowerTerm WebConnect, which allows IT administrators to create personalised log-ons and interfaces for different groups of users. The company has created a standardised desktop for the majority of users and then specialised desktops for specific groups of users such as the sales team. When a new salesperson is appointed, the IT administrator can simply deploy the sales team profile with a few clicks of the mouse.
Features like this have significantly reduced the time required for management and maintenance of the system and led to cost savings in the IT department. "PowerTerm WebConnect is much easier to manage and control compared to Citrix," says Magennis. "Within Citrix, we had to set up the users and then, dependant on their location, add them to each server and give them their permissions. This was quite cumbersome. Basically something that may previously have taken quarter of an hour, now literally takes one or two minutes."
He adds: "We can do most administrative tasks 60% to 80% quicker."
In addition to the savings made with the purchase of Ericom, Foyle Food Group is deriving further financial savings from the reductions in time required to manage the system. "Taking into account the reduced cost to implement and maintain, compared to just upgrading the Citrix product to it's latest version, and the costs saved in being able to reduce the number of physical servers, WebConnect will have fully paid for itself in approximately the first 6 months," claims Magennis.
A positive user experience
Users have responded very positively to the new remote access system. The log-in process is very straight-forward, and the reliability of the solution is excellent. There are many features that offer added convenience for users too. For example, if a session has a time-out, users are presented with the application at the same point as where they left off, when they rejoin.
The performance of the Ericom product has also impressed Foyle Food Group. "Users experience quicker application response times using PowerTerm WebConnect," adds Magennis. "It has a lighter footprint on the desktop and doesn't impact on applications running locally either. It seems to be a solid and stable package."
In the future, Foyle Food Group may consider replacing its desktop PCs with thin client computers, which will further reduce IT costs for the company. Foyle Food Group also intends to expand the number of remote workers that have access to the system. Looking forwards, Magennis says: "We expect to see an even more significant return on our investment in Ericom as we increase the number of users."
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