About company

Trading company (wholesale of building materials) 2000 people, Eastern Europe.

 Situation

The organization has an extensive network of storage facilities. Inventory of stock balances is carried out using mobile terminals, barcode scanners based on Android, various models and vendors (Zebra, Honeywell, Sigma) using a mobile application that connects to the enterprise accounting system.

The accounting system is available only in the local network, the connection of the terminals is done through the corporate Wi-Fi network. Updates to the mobile application for terminals are made by installing a new version from the apk file. There is no local IT staff at the storage sites.

Updating the version of the mobile application at all terminals of the company could last several days, there was no control over versioning. The operation of the terminals was possible only in the coverage area of ​​corporate Wi-Fi, which led to additional costs for its development.

In connection with the use of terminals from various manufacturers, several device management systems were used that had different settings and functionality, which increased the costs of their administration. The activation time for the new terminal took 2-4 hours, this process was not automated and often led to errors in the configuration of the device or mobile application.
All this increased the cost of IT infrastructure and did not provide a quick response to business requests.

Solution

A single point of management of the organization’s mobile terminals was created based on the Microsoft Intune cloud service. This solution allowed to provide key functionalities:

1. A single approach to managing different devices, regardless of vendor;
2. Standardized device configuration policies;
3. Integration with the corporate application store.

To provide flexibility in connecting new terminals and storage facilities, the following activities were implemented:

1. Configured policies for activation of dedicated devices, allowing you to configure the terminal in kiosk mode for end users, without the participation of IT staff;
2. Communication of “self-service application” has been changed – instead of corporate Wi-Fi and a local network, access to the service is through the publication of Azure App Proxy. This allowed the use of 3G / 4G networks for the operation of mobile terminals;
3. The Conditional Access mechanism has been set up to increase the level of security of the inventory control service.

As part of the project, was developed end-user documentation for terminal configuration and instructions for user support on troubleshooting.

The following results were achieved:

1. The update time of the mobile application version was reduced to 60 minutes
2. Activation of a new terminal is done in 30 minutes
3. Reducing the cost of maintaining a corporate Wi-Fi network – 60%.