Challenge
This Multi-national (international) mobile communications company was experiencing slow boot-up and sign-on times across 20,000 laptop and desktop systems. The hardware consisted of various makes, some as much as six years old. The problem spanned 21 call centers in 20 states, with each call center servicing up to 1,200 units. Each person on every shift took six minutes to turn on the system and log on — an efficiency issue with three shifts per day, 365 days a year.
The customer estimated 10 minutes per system to clean the systems and upgrade the memory. The upgrade was anticipated to take 3,200 man-hours. Although each call center had two to three full-time technicians, overtime costs made it financially unfeasible for them to do their jobs and the upgrade. Adding further complexity, the centers operated 24/7; therefore, the usual after-hours time slot was not available to process all the upgrades at once.
Solution
A customized roll-out solution was designed for the customer. HTG first initiated a study demonstrating that by upgrading the memory to a standard of one gigabyte, three minutes could be saved in the boot-up and sign-on process. Three to twelve technicians were placed at each center for the rollout. In addition, an on-site, dedicated project manager was assigned to the customer. HTG designed and followed a systematic approach for performing the work on the unoccupied machines as each section shut down.
HTG also performed a thorough preventative maintenance diagnostics and cleaning of each system. Due to the age of the hardware, HTG anticipated failures and preemptively created a system of checklists to identify and rectify any problems that could occur during the process. Of the 500 systems identified with potential problems, all but 50 were fixed immediately, onsite.
Results
HTG was able to:
- Complete the upgrade and preventative maintenance in 3.5 minutes instead of 10 minutes
- Shorten the project duration by two thirds
- Finish the entire project in 3 weeks
- Prevent any disruption of the work environment
- Save more than 3 minutes in the boot up and sign on process
The savings to the customer were 91,000 man-hours per month. (3 min x 3 shifts x 20,000 computers = 3000 hours per day.)
HTG also found residual value in the memory chips and reduced the total cost of the project by 17%.
Download the pdf of the Case Study: Large Enterprise Rollout—Mobile Communications Company