How smart tools mobilise business

Stahlgruber GmbH is Germany’s leading automotive accessories and repair specialist. See how we took its services on the road with our mobile solutions.

Mobility has been a key driver of Stahlgruber's success ever since it was founded in 1923. The company supplies automotive repair shops all over Germany as well as in Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovenia, making sure their customers stay mobile, with an inventory of over 500,000 different products.

To mobilise their operations, Stahlgruber has nearly 2,500 staff members in Germany, spread across its headquarters in Sulzbach-Rosenberg and around 64 sales outlets. Of these staff, 300 work exclusively in outside sales, who  depend on mobile and flexible communication solutions in order to access customer data, emails, calendars and contacts.

Working with the outside sales staff are about 150 employees – in particular executives at the sales outlets and internal administrative and support staff – who must be reachable at all times in order to ensure that customers rapidly receive their orders.

The solution deployed up to now, based on laptops and UMTS cards, proved inflexible in daily use. Calling up the required data was time consuming, and the devices could only be updated and administered locally in the company’s in-house IT department. There was no decentralised solution. “In order to continue providing optimal customer service, it was essential to switch over to a more modern mobile office solution,” explains Christian Czech, Network Director at Stahlgruber GmbH.

Flexible connections, more mobile devices

As one of the main specifications, Stahlgruber’s IT department wanted to find a user-friendly and flexible mobile email connection for employees while minimising extra technical commitments and costs as much as possible. Also required was a method for decentralised administration of the mobile devices, that could be integrated economically into the existing IT infrastructure.

Stahlgruber already had good experiences with the use of Nokia mobile phones, so the company opted for a mobile office solution based on Nokia business devices – such as the Nokia E71. A major advantage was that Nokia’s market-leading operations offered a complete package of hardware, mobile office applications and intelligent device management – a truly total solution.

Office on the go: anywhere, anytime

With Mail for Exchange for Nokia smartphones, outside sales staff can access their emails, calendar entries, address books and to-do lists anywhere and anytime, because everything is stored in their own personal Microsoft Exchange account. Staff simply enter data in their mobile phone and then synchronise it with their Exchange account.

Administration of Nokia E71 is carried out using the device management solution supplied by the Cologne IT consulting company SEVEN PRINCIPLES (7P), so that software updates can now be deployed over the air without delay. Any add-ons needed for the Nokia smartphones are uploaded onto the end devices of Stahlgruber employees through mobile wireless connection – anytime, anywhere.

“What convinced us most was that Nokia offered us the right complete solution from a single source,” says Christian Czech. “Nokia’s broad portfolio of mobile end devices that support Mail for Exchange made it the ideal partner for introducing a company-wide solution.”

Better communications with big savings

An additional plus of the Nokia solution, unlike those offered by competitors, is that Nokia Mail for Exchange requires no additional middleware. And there are none of the usual licence fees to be paid for the use of the mobile email solution. Thanks to the integrated Vodafone data plan for mobile access to the internet, Stahlgruber saves further costs.

By opting for a combination of Nokia smartphones with Mail for Exchange, Stahlgruber was able to increase the number of employees with mobile devices from 30 to 450, all within a short period of time. With a continual online connection through their Nokia E71 smartphones, outside sales representatives have faster, more flexible access to all the data they need.

As cost-intensive middleware is not required for this solution, Stahlgruber saves around €50,000 a year compared with other commonly available solutions. Before the end of 2011, Stahlgruber equipped another 50 employees with Mail for Exchange, using Nokia N8, Nokia C7 and Nokia E5 smartphones.