UADR Extends the Value of Google Apps with SAManage
“Google Apps integration is a huge time-saver for us. Now, our SAManage data is never more than a few mouse clicks away“
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Background
For more than 30 years, United Auto Delivery and Recovery (UADR) has been a leader in the repossession and remarketing industry. The company has been serving clients in TN, AL, KY, MS, AR, MO, CO, and GA since 1974.
According to Director of IT Thom Holcomb, the lifecycle of the company’s PC and laptop inventory had become extremely difficult to track and manage. With limited resources and full accountability to a cost-conscious CFO, Holcomb and his team needed a better approach to IT asset management (ITAM).
Challenges
UADR’s inventory of PCs and laptops is somewhat of a “moving target”. These assets are moved around frequently, and often spend more time on the road than they do in a traditional office. This made it hard to not only monitor each unit’s location and status, it made it quite challenging to provide information to accounting staff, who need to accurately calculate depreciation.
Initially, Holcomb had pieced together a homegrown inventory management solution. But it proved to be limited in scope as a growing percentage of the company’s technology assets resided outside of the traditional LAN-based environment. For example, remote locations could not access stored system data. And, because PCs could not be accounted for unless they were connected to the company’s network, it was nearly impossible to monitor assets while they were at branch offices or in repo trucks.
“We knew that what we had simply wasn’t meeting our needs,” Holcomb claims. “We started looking at other alternatives, but most required us to install and maintain new servers to support the environment – which brought big upfront and hidden costs, and created a greater burden on our already thinly-staffed department. Then, we came across SAManage in the Google Apps Marketplace and signed up for a free trial. It turned out to be exactly what we needed.”
Solution
Holcomb and his staff were impressed with the simplicity of the SAManage solution. It delivered all the functionality UADR needed, and because it is cloud-based, it is intuitive and easy to use, and eliminates the hassles of deploying and administering hardware and software on-site.
“We noticed a difference almost immediately,” he states. “Inventory management is, by nature, a tedious process. But SAManage makes it so much easier.”
UADR is also leveraging SAManage’s seamless integration with Google Apps. This provides users with convenient, yet secure single sign-on capabilities.
“This is a huge time-saver for us, since we don’t have to worry about multiple userIDs and passwords,” Holcomb adds. “Now, our SAManage data is never more than a few mouse clicks away. And, our HR team can more efficiently set up new IT users. Once they’re entered into the Google environment, they’re ready to use SAManage.”
The company is not only leveraging the SAManage service for IT asset management, they’re using it for software license management as well. “We know how important it is to stay on top of our software licenses. And SAManage allows us to do just that.”
Benefits
Holcomb has nothing but praise for SAManage. “Suddenly, it was so much easier to reconcile our inventory and keep the status of all our equipment up to date.”
But, greater efficiency and accuracy in its inventory management activities isn’t the only benefit UADR has realized. Since deploying the ITAM solution, the company has seen a notable improvement in machine performance, due to an ability to more proactively detect and remove spyware and other threats.
“The risk widget is a feature we use almost every day,” Holcomb adds. “It allows us to deal with threats early, instead of waiting until they cause major problems.”
“At the heart of our success with SAManage is the fact that the solution is based on ITIL. We can serve our business in the most effective and cost-efficient way, because their needs are always tightly aligned with our activities,” he concludes.
