|
COMPANY OVERVIEW
Gates Corporation is a leading manufacturer of quality belt and hose products for industrial and automotive markets. The company became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tomkins, a world-class global engineering and manufacturing group, in 1996. Divided into three product groups—Worldwide Fluid Power, Worldwide Power Transmission and Worldwide Automotive Aftermarket—Gates operates 43 manufacturing facilities and 27 distribution centers in 20 countries.
THE CHALLENGE
With over 13,000 employees and a large sales force spread around the world, the Gates Corporation is continuously evaluating the effectiveness of its technology services on employee productivity. In preparation for a strategic company-wide technology initiative, the corporation’s Worldwide IT Group found several issues related to mobile communications. These challenges included:
1) Lack of a cohesive mobility strategy across the company.
2) Employees with individual carrier agreements for a variety of mobile services that increased costs and complicated support.
3) No coordinated plan for supporting the growing number of advanced mobile devices that employees wanted (and needed) for access to mobile e-mail, appointments and contacts.
THE SOLUTION
In 2005, the Worldwide IT Group received approval to implement a three-year strategic services plan, named the Gates Strategic Collaboration Initiative, or Project SCI, to leverage technology to dramatically improve worker productivity. A key part of the plan was a mobility component aimed at creating a cohesive mobile strategy for the company’s employees and sales staff.
Under Project SCI, the Worldwide IT Group began standardizing on an approved set of cell phones, smartphones and PDAs from Cingular including the 2125 SmartPhone, 8125 PocketPC and the Palm ® Treo™ 650. In addition, the group started phasing out BlackBerry® and standardized on Good Mobile Messaging from Good Technology.
“The key to making Project SCI work was providing the right balance between standardization and device choice,” said Paul Wise, Global Mobility Specialist for Gates Corporation. “Good Mobile Messaging made this easy. Because of the number of devices supported by the product, employees can choose the device they want without creating an additional support burden for IT, thanks to Good Mobile Messaging’s seamless, consistent interface and features across all device types. This also minimizes the amount of training and learning required and reduces our total cost of ownership.”
At the same time the Worldwide IT Group was implementing Project SCI, Gates was migrating from Novell GroupWise to Microsoft® Exchange and Outlook.® “As employees became familiar with Outlook’s functionality, everyone began to see the productivity and time-saving benefits of having mobile access to their Outlook e-mail, calendar, contacts and tasks,” added Wise.
Another key to the success of Project SCI was creating and implementing the right policies to quickly and easily approve users and equip them with the best device based on their specific needs. To accomplish this, the Worldwide IT Group implemented clear, easy-to-use polices and a Web-based approval process for each business unit.
By making the process easy, the entire company was able to quickly move toward its goal of having every qualified employee using the right device, at the right time, for the right costs. Already, Gates is down to just 20 BlackBerry users. Wise anticipates decommissioning the BlackBerry server in 2006.
THE RESULTS
“We have implemented mobile device policies that are designed to tailor the most effective mobile device to the user based on their specific job profile, and these policies include Good Mobile Messaging being loaded to SmartPhone and PDA devices.”
A driving factor for standardizing on Good Mobile Messaging was being able to reduce user support time. “With Good Mobile Messaging, it takes literally seconds to administer a new user,” said Wise. “The end-user installation steps are very easy and we have never had a single installation go poorly. In addition, the user interface is so straightforward. This, combined with creative media options for end-user training provided by Good Mobile Messaging, allows user adoption to take place very quickly.”
This is in stark contrast to the situation before Good Mobile Messaging, when the company’s IT support staff had to troubleshoot numerous outages and error messages that would occur using the BlackBerry service. Unhappy users needed frequent desktop visits, requiring the specialists to spend a lot of time researching and troubleshooting problems—frustrating users and taking valuable time away from more important support requests and IT projects.
“With Good Mobile Messaging, support time literally dropped to zero,” exclaimed Wise. “This factor alone made Good Mobile Messaging a great investment.”
Devices with Good Mobile Messaging are also easy to set up and deploy, without requiring users to ever part with—or IT personnel to physically touch—devices. The IT team simply does a Secure Over-the-Air (OTA) setup of Good Mobile Messaging—with
the user and provides a hands-on tutorial. After that, the IT team rarely, if ever hears from users again about Good Mobile Messaging related problems. “We’ll occasionally get a support call, but it is always related to the device itself, not Good Mobile Messaging,” said Wise.
When devices need to be upgraded, the OTA feature allows the support staff to send updates quickly, efficiently and easily. “Good Mobile Messaging’s OTA capabilities have really made our jobs much easier,” commented Wise.
Good Mobile Messaging also provides the enterprise-class security required by a global organization such as the Gates Corporation. With the security features found in the Good Mobile Messaging server, the Worldwide IT Group can remotely secure and clear mobile devices if they are lost or stolen. “With Good Mobile Messaging, we have peace of mind knowing we can secure a device almost immediately, protecting sensitive information from falling into the wrong hands.”
In addition to the management and security benefits for the IT team, Good Mobile Messaging improves worker productivity, customer service and sales activities. During the evaluation of Project SCI, Wise and his team received the following comments:
- “The ability to address urgent e-mails while on the road has increased our inter-organization communication, leading to faster response times and improved productivity.”
- “My sales staff is more effective while traveling by being able to manage their e-mails and respond to customer requests more quickly. This leads them to spend more time on value-driven sales activities versus non-value-added administrative tasks.”
“These are just a few of the comments we received when evaluating the effectiveness of our mobility strategy, in which Good Mobile Messaging played a key role,” concluded Wise.
Future Plans
Good Mobile Messaging has been such a benefit for Gates’ executives and mobile employees that the Worldwide IT Group is now looking at providing mobile access to the company’s customer relationship management (CRM) application using Good Mobile Intranet™. “Based on the results we’ve seen so far, we believe Good Technology is the partner that will enable us to deliver this key functionality to our mobile sales force,” concluded Wise.
|
