The customer
The EDEKA group of companies in Northern Bavaria-Saxony-Thuringia, based in Rottendorf, is one of seven regional groups of companies in the EDEKA group. It supplies around 900 retail stores in northern Bavaria, northern Baden-Württemberg, Thuringia, and Saxony, making it the largest local food supplier in the region.
EDEKA Südwest is the second-largest regional company in the EDEKA group. Around 1,200 stores, five logistics centers, and six production companies in five federal states.
The goal
The objective is to supply many employees applications at the headquarters and in the branches via a managed software distribution solution. The requirement is to have good infrastructure planning and implementation. In addition, the various software packages must be implemented in the same way through standardized processes and guidelines.
To guarantee this, Apptimized proposed and implemented a hybrid solution at the beginning of the collaboration, and essentially consists of three modules:
- The care of the customer`s application environment by a senior consultant
- Remote software packaging
- Support from on-site engineers
EDEKA in Northern Bavaria and Edeka Southwest currently operate their own infrastructures, which plan to be replaced from 2021 in cooperation with Apptimized. Also on the agenda to set up a completely new and future-oriented infrastructure – Edeka south data center.
The Solution: Remote and on-site software packaging
EDEKA has been supplied with software packages from the beginning of the collaboration to the present day. During the entire duration, various project situations (including the Windows 10 migration) were supervised, and technical changes were implemented in cooperation with the customer and the on-site consultant. For some complex applications and driver-dependent hardware certifications, on-site engineers were used to carry out the work in the customer’s environment.
The cloud-based Apptimized portal serves as additional support for processing the tasks in the area of package creation and distribution. Using the Apptimized platform, the customer can quickly and easily create the request to Apptimized specialists and also benefits from the various tools for simplifying the individual process steps:
- simplify the process of creating installation guidelines, as a requirement for packagers,
- ticket-based approach to check the status of the request
- 24/5 live chat supports communication
In the future, further optimization is to be achieved through the use of the Apptimized SCCM integration. The customer can create finished packages with just one click of the mouse and then deploy them to the infrastructure, based on predefined templates in SCCM.
SCCM Consulting
EDEKA benefits significantly from the specific specialist knowledge of the on-site consultant in the subject of Microsoft SCCM (today Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager). The following subject areas should be particularly emphasized:
- Concept creation for Windows servers and clients (images, software deployment, packaging guidelines, etc.)
- Automation of various process steps
- Creation of an “Application Import Script”
- Problem and error analysis for SCCM server
- Support of the annual hardware certification (driver updates, BIOS updates, etc.)
- Support with Windows 10 upgrade (planning, organization, technical acceptance, etc.)
Technical consulting
In addition to the activities described in software distribution and software packaging, the consultant also provided support with Active Directory, IT security, Windows server, and file server migration. As a technical project consultant, they also supported project and sub-project management in the planning and organization of IT projects, such as Windows 10 migration or file server migration.
Construction of EDEKA data center south
The initial planning and conceptual work for the construction of the EDEKA data center south are currently underway. In cooperation with the Apptimized Consultant, “the best” from the two current environments is adopted.
We have been very satisfied with the cloud-based packaging solutions and on-site consulting from Apptimized for many years. The overall offer from Apptimized, especially in connection with our complex infrastructures, only offers advantages for us. Apptimized efficiently delivers high-quality solutions and combines excellent service with an excellent price-performance ratio. This also confirmed our decision to tackle the new infrastructure of the data center south together with Apptimized.
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