CLIENT:
Major Automotive Manufacturer
CHALLENGE:
To streamline their IT Strategy and provide a cost-effective centralised
IT solution
SOLUTION:
Active Directory Solution
RESULT
Seamless application & data integration and cost savings
"We believe that Allied Worldwide's experience with such implementation projects was the key to the success of
our Microsoft Project. We have been very impressed with the high degree of support we have enjoyed in all our dealings with
them."
Senior Manager
Major Automotive Manufacturer
Allied Worldwide is an ISO 9001 accredited organisation, uniquely positioned to support today's results-focussed CEO who requires flexible and innovative solutions in an increasingly demanding global environment, to deliver high performance business solutions against ever decreasing time scales.
Major Automotive Manufacturer Streamlines Corporate Strategy with Active Directory Solution
Allied Worldwide assists Major Automotive Manufacturer with an enterprise-wide Active
Directory Solution, to simplify application integration & support data communication across
the enterprise, while reducing costs.
About our Client
This UK based company is a subsidiary of a large German car manufacturer with facilities and
operations across the globe. This organisation is responsible for the distribution, sales, marketing
and promotion of all automobile products in the UK, and provides a host of support services to their
dealer network and customers.
The Scenario
The group corporate applications were moving to an Active Directory technology, and the
automotive manufacturer's strategy was to ensure that applications in future would be deployed via
a Centralised Deployment Tool to be incorporated within Active Directory.
Without Active Directory, the UK business could not participate in the corporate group strategy and
the European platform would increase the pressure associated with maintaining a local and costly
Novell environment.
Business Challenge
The German car manufacturer’s corporate objectives required a plan to centralise their IT strategy
and move to a locked down XP platform. This relied totally on participation in the group's active
directory and on overcoming the high cost of ownership, by administering systems and solutions
from several suppliers.
Additional concerns to be addressed involved functionality, legacy applications, secure data
exchange and the need for ease of use, combined with the ease of managing the system for future
global solutions.
The Solution
A scalable, resilient Active Directory Solution was implemented, which enabled a safe and secure
migration, and alignment of all corporate users into one corporate strategy. The Allied team worked
on the Customer Data Integration (CDI) Project and assisted in the following areas:
- Creation of a number of tightly controlled XP desktop builds and the creation of log scripts to
deliver authentication, via active directory and conditional application deployment.
- Decision process within the application deployment method (complete design based on
windows Terminal Server, Citrix, Altiris and SMS 2003) and the deployment of applications via
SMS 2003. This replaced a NAL 500 application, which was tested for the first time on XP and
packaged using WISE, to deploy via SMS 2003.
- Augmentation of the customer helpdesk facilities to cover peaks in load when new desktops are
introduced; and provision of a team to build & deploy desktops, to reduce support overhead.
- Physical deployment of around 1600 new desktop and laptop computers.
The Result
Allied Worldwide's experience of managing high level and strategic technical strategies made us
the customer’s partner of choice. A partnership approach allowed them to prove their capabilities in
order to drive the Active Directory Project forward from development, design, testing, specification
and implementation, with minimum disruption and seamless migration.
The Active Directory solution has aligned the UK business with German HQ developments and the
business is able to share data with other global locations far more easily. This provided the ability to
implement a solid and stable environment, which is fully prepared for the next generation of desktop
operating systems and less reliant upon legacy and unsupported applications, such as NT4 and
Novell.
Additionally, this implementation has delivered a lower total cost of ownership, compared to the
high cost of ownership involved in administering the previous system and solution from multiple
suppliers.
