Customer Solution Case Study
Overview
Country: United States
Industry:Automotive
Customer Profile
ADESA Car Auctionsis a leading provider of wholesale vehicle auctions and related services, with 10,877 employees and 53 auction sites in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
Business Situation
ADESA sought to transform a decentralized and diverse server and desktop environment into a tightly managed and more easily maintained IT infrastructure.
Solution
ADESA deployed Microsoft®Office Professional Edition 2003 as its enterprise desktop standard and centralized IT management for its geographically dispersed operations.
Benefits
Smooth deployment
Greater IT efficiency and control
Eliminated 87 percent of e-mail servers
Enhanced employee collaboration / “Standardizing on Microsoft Office 2003 across our company has saved a tremendous amount of time for both our central and local IT resources.”
Brian Osborne, IT Support Services Manager, ADESA
Carmel, Indiana-based ADESACar Auctions is a leading automobile auction provider, employing nearly 11,000people in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. With a variety of computing environments in itsgeographically dispersed offices, the company sought to transform its diverse IT environment into a tightly managed and standardized infrastructure.
Partnering with Core Business Technology Solutions, a Microsoft® Gold Partner,ADESA implemented a major IT standardization effort, including software and hardware upgrades throughout the company. With the help of Microsoft tools and resources, ADESA deployed Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 and updated its employee desktop systems quickly and smoothly.As a result, ADESA made significant reductions in server hardware, and its IT staff is able to support the organization more efficiently.
Situation
To ensure a reliable supply of high-quality vehicles in inventory, automobile dealers rely on auctions—a significant sector in the automobile industry. And no publicly-traded company delivers more auctions in North America than ADESA. Based in Carmel,Indiana, the ADESA Car Auctions’ network includes 53locations where used vehiclesare auctioned, 30 locations for the auction of salvaged vehicles, and 83 loan production offices.
Managing this many facilitiesand the thousands of vehicles that move through them is a highly complex process, requiring a solid technology infrastructure. Like many companies with multiple locations and decentralized IT management, ADESA found that an increasing number of non-standard computing products and practices were being introduced at various auction sites. This created challenges for the IT staff in responding to help-desk requests and in keeping systems up-to-date and secure.
“With so many offices delivering services around North America, we saw a real opportunity to begin to centralize and standardize our technology infrastructure,” explains Brian Osborne, IT Support Services Manager at ADESA. “The desktop deployment process was part of an overall IT standardization project.”
A snapshot of ADESA’s increasingly unwieldy technology infrastructure included:
Varied approaches to security rights across 53 different domains and file and print servers.
Multiple versions of the Microsoft® Windows®operating system and Microsoft Office running on PCs.
Multiple desktop hardware models from different manufacturers.
“We have regional IT professionals assigned to a group of auction locations,” Osborne advises. “IT staff memberswould often go to a single site and encounter five different operating systems—and two or three different versions of Office. When you have an environment this diverse, it takes much more time for the IT department to keep systems upgraded and ensure the latest security updates.”
Even when the IT team could maintain the appropriate software updates, it was difficult to ensure that they were installed. “Each ADESA auction facility was on a separate domain, so even though we had Microsoft Systems Management Server working at many sites, if we pushed out a software update, it might not get installed on every machine,”recallsOsborne.
The ADESA IT team laid out the following goals for the project:
- Standardize desktop software and hardwareused across the enterpriseto streamline IT support.
- Consolidate systems management for improved efficiency, control, and security.
- Provide ADESA employees a consistent computing environment with the most current tools for enhancing productivity and collaboration.
Solution
As a core part of its standardization effort, ADESA completed a comprehensive upgrade to Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003.Other important components of the project were to standardize desktop hardware throughout thecompany and also to centralize the management of the company’s e-mail servers.
A Five-Phase Deployment
ADESA’s successful deploymentof Microsoft Office 2003 was planned and executed in five steps:
- Planning the Deployment – First, ADESA formed a deployment team that combined members of the ADESA IT staff and Core Business Technology Solutions, a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner. “Overall, the team structure was very effective throughout the project,” commentsRobin Lain, Principal Consultant with Core Business Technology Solutions and the technical lead on the deployment. “Good communication can solve nearly any issue, so we paid a lot of attention to how we set it up.”
To help plan the deployment, the team used the Plan, Build, and Deploy Guide, a component of the Microsoft Solution Accelerator for Business Desktop Deployment.The resource provides information on deployment project planning, timelines, team roles, and other project management information.
“Whenever we performa Microsoft Office deployment, we take advantage of the tools Microsoft has developed to make it easier.The ADESA deployment of Microsoft Office 2003 was a good example of this,” Lain adds. “The Solution Accelerator for Business Desktop Deployment is our standard template for deployments. It has resources for every phase of the process, and it is a tool that we have become very familiar with. It makes the whole process go more smoothly.”
- Taking anInventory – Next, the team completed an inventory of all desktop software and hardware, using Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 (SMS). According to Lain, “We used SMS to run reports on which versions of Microsoft Office and which operating systems were installed. Using SMS, we could get a good understanding of the environment and what needed to be done.”
The team also performed an inventory of all of the company’s desktop hardware, including information on processors, memory, and disk space. Osborne explains,“Wetook this opportunity to standardize our desktop hardware throughout the company. Since the auction sites used to purchase their own hardware, there was a wide variety of systems out there. We inventoried every single piece of hardware and replaced what we needed to. Now we have desktop hardware standards in place, which will save a lot of time when it comes to upgrading and supporting our systems.”
- Creating a Desktop Software"Image" – The team then used SMS 2003 to createan"image" of the standardized desktop PC software. This image served as the master for deploying the new and updated operating systems and applications. The deployment teamutilized the Office Resource Kit to configure and build the image components.
“The Office Resource Kit,in combination with SMS, makes Office deployments very straightforward,” Osborne observes. “One thing that was really important to us was to standardize on a consistentdesktop software configuration for the entire company. This consistency makes it far easier to manage supporting our staff and our infrastructure. It ensures that we can maintain current softwareand security updates on every machine. And it provides a consistent user interface to employees, regardless of where they are. Any employeecan easily work atany auction site because all the auction sites are now configured the same.”
Another important use of the Office Resource Kit was to provide guidance in the use of Group Policy in Microsoft Windows Server®2003. Group Policy is an infrastructure used to deliver specified Office configurations to a set of targeted users and computers. “We are using Group Policy quite heavily. For instance, we have turned on Cached Exchange Mode [a feature in the Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 messaging and collaboration client]. With Group Policy and centrally managed desktop software, we can ensure that everyone at the auction sites will have the same Office configuration.” said Osborne.
- Deployment to Pilot Sites – Once the desktop software image was created, the deployment team delivered it to a number of pilot sites to test the installation in a variety of environments. During the inventory, the team had used SMS to identify applications in use at ADESA that should be tested for compatibility with Office 2003.The team used the pilot to test and addressany compatibility issues that were identified.
According to Lain, compatibility was not a major issue for the deployment. “For the most part there were no compatibility issues,” he says. “We did have some Microsoft Access databases that required minor revisions, but they were identified in our planning phase, so they didn’t throwus off guard.”
- Company-Wide Deployment –After the deployment pilot, the team was tasked with delivering and installing the new software for the entire organization, with a total of 4,678 desktops. The team delivered the software upgrade to the company at a rate of four sites per week. To handle the deployment effort, the team created a tightly coordinated, collaborative approach.
Jeff Pearson of Core Business Technology Solutions was the project manager for the ADESA deployment. In this role, he oversaw the installation and managed a core team at ADESA headquarters. In addition, four deployment teams were dispatched to auction sites to support the deployment and perform any hands-on installation tasks. Theon-site deployment team leaders remained in close communication with the business managers ateach auction facilityand would escalate any questions or issues back to the team at corporate headquarters.
The corporate deployment team and field teams held weekly meetingsto go over deployment status.Team leaders were also in communication throughwalkietalkie–enabled cell phones throughout the process. Pearson held weekly meetings with senior ADESA leadership to keep them informed of his team’s progress.
In addition to the software deployment, the deployment team was tasked with upgrading the company to standardized computer hardware. To streamline the process, the deployment team set up a centralized desktop configuration center, where systems could be tested and the complete new standardized desktop software could be installed before delivery to the sites.
Lain describes the effort: “Desktops were sent to the configuration center, where we would install the tested and approved software on both current and new desktops. We would then send them out to the auction sites. From there, all that our on-site IT staff had to do was enter the time zone and employee serial number, and then set up the Group Policy settings. This helped a lot in making sure the deployment was as seamless as possible and reduced the amount of support ADESA employees needed to get up and running on their new desktops.”
Using Cached Exchange Modein Outlook 2003
One challenge the ADESA deployment team faced in updating its infrastructure was the need to consolidate its many e-mail servers distributed throughout the organization. According to Osborne, the use of Cached Exchange Mode in Outlook 2003 was a significant factor in enabling this, while maintaining the performance requirements of employees at the auction sites.
“One of our biggest headaches with the existing infrastructure was the number of server domains and the resulting challenges in pushing out software updates toensure that we had the latest security measures in place,” Osborne explains. “We had 53 servers running the Microsoft ExchangeServer [messaging and collaboration server].We really needed to reduce that number to make our workmore manageable. The problem was that the employees at our auction sites were using Outlook in live auction situations. So we couldn’t afford to risk any loss in performance as we centralized the servers. Cached Exchange Mode in Outlook2003 enabled us to reduce the number of servers to seven—and with no loss in e-mail performance for our staff.”
When Cached Exchange Mode is enabled in Outlook 2003, copies ofan employee’sMicrosoft Exchange Server–based mailbox and address book are stored on the desktop. This enables a high level of performance with fast access to data from Outlook 2003. Then the mailbox and address book are updated frequently from a centrally locatedserver running Exchange Server 2003. This means that the ADESA IT group benefits from centralized management of its e-mail servers, and the employees don’t have to suffer poor e-mail performance.
Using Group Policy, ADESA standardized its Outlook 2003 configuration to run with the Cached Exchange Mode feature enabled. The result:Performance is at an all-time high and management of the system has been greatly simplified, reducing the number of servers to manage by 87 percent.
Benefits
Through careful planning and the use of effective tools and resources, ADESA was able to complete its Office deployment quickly and smoothly. In addition to streamliningthe deployment process, the upgrade to the company’s desktop environment has enabled a reduction in time required to maintain and support its IT infrastructure.
Microsoft Tools Ease Deployment
The ADESA deployment team employed a number of Microsoft tools and resources for guidance on best practices and to help streamline its efforts. For planning the deployment, the Microsoft Solution Accelerator for Business Desktop Deployment provided a plan of the entire process. “The Microsoft Plan, Build, and Deploy Guideis something we use in all of our deployments,” Lain comments. “These practices are the best way to ensure a smooth and relatively painless deployment.”
“We did a thorough job of planning,” adds Osborne. “And with SMS we had a complete inventory, so we knew exactly what we needed to do. We encountered very few issues that we didn't expect. When you think about the complexity of a major upgrade on more than 4,600 desktops in dozens of locations, that is amazing.”
Microsoft Systems Management Server also provided the tools the team needed for easily creating and deploying the new standardized desktop configuration. “SMS has really transformed the deployment process through automation. It definitely saves a great deal of IT time and money,” Osborne notes.
Easier Administration and Lighter Support Requirements
The ADESA infrastructure upgrade has produced substantial productivity gains for the company’s IT team, which used to make frequent trips to auction sites to address the issues that arose from having so many different desktop configurations.
According to Osborne, “Now, we centrally manage the standard desktop softwareimage to keep it consistent.We use Group Policy settings, such as mandating the use of Cached Exchange Mode in Outlook 2003, to make sure that it stays this way. We can handle most issues from headquarters. Yet, any one of our techs can go out to an auction site and work with the same consistent environment they would find at any other auction site.”
“The difference in deploying software updates is like night and day,” he reports. “We no longer need multiple updates for multiple operating systems, and now we can be certain we are securing all of the machines at every ADESA site.”
Moreover, reducing the number of servers has already had an impact. “Going from 53 to seven domains has improved efficiency and performance in a variety of ways. For example, not having to maintain antivirus protection on that many servers is a huge savings in time,” Lain observes. “Cached Exchange Mode means that ADESA has the best of both worlds: a highly manageable system with efficient use of bandwidth and improved desktop performance. Office 2003 was essential to make this possible.”
“Standardizing on Microsoft Office 2003 across our company has saved a tremendous amount of time for both our central and local IT resources,” Osborne concludes.
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