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Australia’s largest manufacturer of paint products
As home to some of Australia’s most recognised and trusted architectural brands that include Dulux, Selleys, Yates and B&D, DuluxGroup traces its origins in the country back to 1918. With over 4000 employees across the world, their products help people build, decorate and maintain their homes and buildings for a comfortable, durable, luxurious and safe living.
One of the reasons for the DuluxGroup’s longstanding success is their ability to adapt, innovate, invest and reimagine their products and processes. This core attribute supported the organisation’s workforce transformation, migration to cloud services and implementation of state-of-the-art technologies to efficiently manage their enterprise mobile devices in a world where flexible, mobile and remote working have become the new norm.
Minimising business risks
A couple of years ago, to meet the ever-evolving business requirements and sustain their growth, DuluxGroup started its transition towards being an agile, mobile and remote workforce. This meant empowering their workforce with mobile technologies and devices to serve their consumers around-the-clock and from the field.
With the help of workforce mobility, migration to cloud applications and other ICT services, DuluxGroup improved their mobile productivity and offered greater on-demand services including home maintenance and repair that mostly delivered desired and positive business outcomes.
However, this dependency on mobility came at a cost as the deployment, repair or recovery of enterprise devices was tedious, time-consuming and leading to direct loss of productivity, huge IT and repair costs and poor customer experience. DuluxGroup needed a solution to minimise these significant business risks.
“The need to innovate was born because of much deeper understanding of DuluxGroup’s strategy. When we were looking to align our business and exploring multiple technologies, the connection we need to have with our consumers meant our workforce needed to be mobile. It’s more critical now than it used to be”
Eglantine Etiemble, CIO of the DuluxGroup.
Traditionally, when a new device gets deployed to a user, the IT team procures the device from an OEM or vendor, installs required business, configures security applications, allows or restricts admin access then deploys it to the employee for their use. Typical turnaround time (TAT) for such cases, including repair or recovery services, would be quite significant which could cause considerable loss of productivity, high employee downtime costs and poor customer experience.
AutoPilot Modern Management
DuluxGroup’s workforce transformation aimed to deliver more flexibility, increased productivity and better overall experience for its consumers and employees by providing enterprise mobile devices. However, procurement, configuration, deployment and recovery of these devices proved to be a substantial task for the organisation’s IT team.
DuluxGroup engaged and worked with Telstra and Microsoft, who helped them to design and deploy Autopilot Modern Management which automated and simplified the process of managing the enterprise devices.
From initial deployment of a new device to its end of life, AutoPilot Modern Management can setup and pre-configure enterprise devices so that employees can use them as soon as they receive it, simply, by connecting to a network and verifying their user credentials. It comes with little to no infrastructure to manage, a process that is easy, quick and simple that enables the IT team to seamlessly reset, repurpose and recover the devices.
The Autopilot Modern Management enables the DuluxGroup’s workforce to
- enrol devices into MDM, EMM and UEM services for device management.
- connect to cloud services as per the group’s or user’s policies.
- allow or restrict admin rights for users.
- create and assign devices to groups based on user profile.
- deliver an improved out-of-box experience (OOBE).
Improved employee experience and productivity
With AutoPilot Modern Management, DuluxGroup can quickly procure and deploy devices as the solution uses OEM-optimised version of the operating system which is pre-installed and avoids reimaging. Business-critical applications can be installed while configuring the devices as per the company’s security and content policies. Once an order for a new device is placed, the user can get their business-ready state device in two days instead of a week. After deployment, the devices can be managed via Microsoft Intune or similar applications.
“Telstra brought their partnership with Microsoft as well to strengthen us in the areas where we are not robust. This shows our resilience and commitment to do what’s best for our consumers and business. We are taking all we can from this innovation journey”
Eglantine Etiemble, CIO of the DuluxGroup.
The solution allowed the group’s IT team to focus on business-critical functions instead of building and customising images for devices to be deployed later which was time-consuming. Once the device reaches the user, the only interaction is to verify their user credentials to start using the device.
Using cloud-based services and AutoPilot Modern Device Management, DuluxGroup has:
- reduced the time and resources spent by IT on deploying, managing and recovery of enterprise devices.
- saved on infrastructure required to maintain and operate the devices.
- delivered exceptional user experience for its workforce which helped to increase their productivity.
