Manually managing and securing mobile devices and enterprise apps was costly and time consuming and delayed the deployment of new mobile capabilities. With the IBM MaaS360 cloud offering, Arrow is decreasing the time and cost of mobility management, and strengthening mobile security.
As Arrow began deploying mobile apps to reduce paperwork and costs, IT staff needed a way to effectively manage, deploy and safeguard employee mobile devices and apps.
Arrow is using a cloud-based enterprise mobility management platform from IBM that dramatically simplifies management, deployment and security of mobile devices and apps.
“We want to empower our workforce and get project/site managers out of site offices and into the field more,” explains Wayne Broekhals, IT manager for Arrow, a leading construction company in New Zealand.
The construction industry has long faced very low margins and high expectations, and Arrow believes mobile solutions are critical in helping the company reduce costs while increasing quality. “A lot of time and value is lost when project/site managers have to bring notes and photos from the project site back to their offices and reenter that data into an IT system,” says Broekhals.
Through the company’s enterprise mobility initiative, Arrow’s IT team is deploying a variety of new mobile construction-based apps that enable project/site managers to capture and share information from the construction site with colleagues and subcontractors. It’s a huge step in helping streamline processes and reduce construction delays. But critical to the success of the program was enterprise mobility management and mobile security.
“Previously, devices would have to come back to our office to be reprogrammed,” says Broekhals. “There was considerable time, effort and cost involved to courier them back and forth, and when the devices were out in the field, we had no visibility if someone had jailbroken their phone, or if the device had a virus. There was a very high risk in terms of protecting our intellectual property. The demand for mobility is just going to increase over time and we couldn’t facilitate that with our previous approach.”
Arrow implemented IBM MaaS360 enterprise mobility management to simplify deployment and management of the company’s smartphones and tablets, and strengthen mobile security. Integration with enterprise systems, such as Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Office365, enable the company to use its existing applications on mobile devices.
“IBM MaaS360 provided a cost-effective solution that enables us to rapidly deploy a construction-based app on the fly and provides the visibility we needed to effectively manage devices and usage,” says Broekhals.
According to Broekhals, the solution’s malware detection and remediation capabilities stood out during the company’s evaluation.
“One of the key reasons we picked MaaS360 was because of the anti-malware capability,” says Broekhals. “Other products we tested didn’t have that all-around capability to protect against viruses and malware in a single solution.”
The IBM MaaS360 platform was also very easy to implement. “It only took about a week before we had the system up and running, and then we just applied the mobile devices to it,” says Broekhals. “We selected the cloud deployment, which makes it easy for us to manage and scale up or down depending on the number of devices we need to support.”
In gaining buy-in from the company’s Steering Committee, Broekhals emphasised the risk in moving toward a mobile strategy without protecting mobile devices.
“We discussed the need to not only know where our devices are, but also protect them—that was the key message in gaining executive approval.”
Comprehensive enterprise mobility management and security is helping Arrow significantly lower the time and cost of managing mobile devices and applications.
“MaaS360 is saving Arrow time and money,” says Broekhals. “It’s been quite considerable in terms of the time savings and lower administration overhead, especially for devices that get stolen or have malware on them, since we can handle everything remotely. Before we had to have a staff engineer focused on mobile devices, and now that we have MaaS360, he can focus on the other areas that are adding value to the business. Our project/site managers also have less downtime now that they no longer have to send their mobile devices back to our offices for updates. The return on investment made it a no-brainer.”
It will also help accelerate the deployment of new mobile applications. “We will be able to get applications out within days, instead of the weeks or months that it would take with a normal roll-out,” says Broekhals.
Additionally, stronger security is helping the company better protect its intellectual property. In fact, following deployment, IBM MaaS360 automatically detected and remediated a malware infection on one of the company’s mobile devices. “MaaS360 gives us visibility not only if a device is attacked, but also that the device is protected. "
With a strong foundation in place, the IT team can now focus on deploying a wide-range of construction-based applications for its workforce.
“With MaaS360, we’re laying the foundations for IT to be more agile, delivering technology to their fingertips and ultimately better outcomes for Arrow,” says Broekhals.
Arrow International (NZ) Limited is a privately owned New Zealand construction company that began in Dunedin over 30 years ago. With a branch network of 10 offices across New Zealand, Arrow has a very strong regional/provincial presence. Arrow International (NZ) Limited is part of the Arrow Group with other notable operating companies including Arcus Developments (a property development company) and Arrow Construction Australia (a construction company based in Melbourne).
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