Ferntree Gully Motor Group consolidates IT across five locations. Cuts support costs by 50 per cent with Emerging IT.
Ferntree Gully Motor Group (FGMG) is one of Australia’s most awarded automotive dealerships. In 2014, the group grew rapidly through acquisition, adding 100 extra staff and moving from one location to five separate geographical locations with new offices, workshops and showrooms.
While it was an exciting time for the business, such rapid growth brought real challenges. The IT team had to consolidate highly disparate technology across five locations while keeping IT services operational to
support more than 190 staff.
Challenge: consolidate infrastructure and support 190 staff
- Each dealership with different management software to support high profile manufacturers
including Holden and Volkswagen. - Technology infrastructure inherited through the acquisition was at various stages of its usable
lifecycle.
With the clock ticking, FGMG’s CIO decided to strengthen his team’s ability to deal with these challenges by engaging Emerging IT. The main goal was to build scalable infrastructure that could support a growing and fluid business with changing technology requirements.
Senior engineers and solutions architects from Emerging IT worked closely with FGMG to identify business priorities and create a two-year upgrade roadmap for transformation.
Solution: Deploy a standard operating environment (SOE) to stabilise the user environment.
- First, a flexible project implementation plan was developed to keep the lights on while moving FGMG to an enterprise-grade framework.
- To integrate so many contrasting services, resilient server and storage infrastructure was deployed with failover capability. This could be activated immediately during a systems outage to protect FGMG’s irreplaceable intellectual property across all five sites.
- Emerging IT deployed a standard operating environment (SOE) to stabilise the user environment. Standardising assets on one architecture simplified software licencing issues and ensured employees could logon from any location to access appropriate company resources.
- Much of the ageing technology inherited was posing a serious security risk. Emerging IT took this opportunity to refresh infrastructure group-wide. Identifying a variety of user needs, it provided a mix of business applications to user groups, which also resulted in considerable savings on software.
Results
Following the success of this infrastructure project, FGMG has formally engaged Emerging IT on an ongoing basis. Technology specialists at every level of IT support, up to level four, are available on call to offer support for the dealership’s technology improvements.
"Managed IT Services are definitely the best improvement in IT our organisation has ever made. We've reduced IT support costs by more than 50%."
Craig Pearce, Chief Executive Officer
Ferntree Gully Motor Group