How Holcim ANZ used cloud desktop and Dex to stay strong through the pandemic
Since 2018, building product manufacturer Holcim has been taking steps towards a cloud desktop, and when the pandemic hit in 2020, around half of its employees were working off their phone thanks to Samsung Dex.
"What we found was because we had rolled out already a smart device with Dex ... users only needed to transport their monitors if they didn't have one at home," Holcim ANZ IT operations director Andrew Hiscox said.
"We supplied all our users with Dex station, which we procured in advance ... and we were able to leverage our proof-of-concept environment to operate very seamlessly through COVID."
The shift towards a phone-first workforce coupled with cloud-based virtual desktops began with getting the company's 260 sites and 3,700 workers off copper lines.
By using Telstra Liberate and deploying Samsung devices, Holcim ANZ took 85% of its landlines and a third of its total telecommunication cost away.
The company also took the opportunity to use the shutting down of its two-way analogue radio network to consolidate the number of devices used by its 1,450 owner-driver workforce and move to a push-to-talk system using Samsung Note and Tab Active devices, which can also use Dex. These changes saved the company around 40% compared to its existing solution.
"In the past, you had to go through the plants to contact the driver to advertise communications inside the business, have your meetings in the mornings, and so forth," Hiscox said.
"Now we've got a means using the Knox platform to communicate to all our drivers straight away. We can push videos, and push updates to the applications, we can push newsletters to devices on demand -- that for us is a success."
Holcim also deployed an in-house sign-on-glass application to its truck devices that reduce the time for a customer to have an invoice from weeks, to a same day service.
Hiscox said after using Dex as his main environment since 2018 -- first with a local virtual desktop and then one based in the cloud -- that the company would complete its cloud desktop shift within the next year.