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The Client

In 1958, the Brake brothers created in the United Kingdom the Brake company to distribute poultry products to restaurants. Today, Brake has expanded into Ireland, France and Sweden. Brake France was established in 1992 and has grown by integrating local businesses. Twenty years after its creation, with € 540m turnover and more than 500 local products, Brake France has made its name in French gastronomy.

Brake France employs 1,900 staff to supply restaurants, as well as company, school and hospital canteens. The food retailer selects, develops and distributes a range of fresh, frozen, dairy and grocery products. Brake’s mission is to make the life of restaurateurs easier by providing high quality and creative products in a timely manner.

Employees are often on the move - traveling between Brake’s 45 sites and visiting the company’s 43,000 clients. Brake prioritizes its customers’ needs and guarantees next day delivery for all orders placed by 3:00 pm. The company is able to uphold this commitment to its customers due to its excellent logistics network and connectivity between employees.

The Challenge

The leadership team at Brake France need to stay connected to the operational teams to collect data, perform analytics and make executive decisions in real time. The enterprise needed to equip the executive committee with tablets enrolled with an app that would enable them to review the key performance indicators (KPI) and make decisions accordingly.
In 2010, the company decided to deploy a range of corporate-owned, personally enabled (COPE) mobile devices. These configured, corporate-owned devices are provided to employees for professional use but are enabled for personal use as well. While investing in expensive technology and tools to improve employees’ productivity, the company wanted the ability to specify the security settings, to deploy applications according to users’ profiles, to locate the device and to remotely wipe corporate data from the device in case of theft or loss. To do so, Brake France needed an enterprise mobile management (EMM) solution.

The Solution

After reviewing a number of studies and demos, Brake France selected the AirWatch solution to meet its mobility needs. “AirWatch has the ability to offer the same functionalities across all the operating systems, which in 2010 was a significant differentiator,” said Gilbert Mazet, director of infrastructure, Brake France. “The solution’s multitenant architecture, the flexible licences and the quality of our relationship confirmed AirWatch was the right decision.”
During implementation, two of the company’s IT administrators enrolled 180 devices into AirWatch in just two weeks. The devices, a mix of iPhones and Android Galaxy Note tablets, were distributed to the executive committee and employees in management positions in the human resources, operations and sales departments. “Implementing AirWatch was a quick, streamlined process for our IT team and we appreciated the reactivity of the AirWatch support teams,” said Mr. Mazet. Configuring the Android devices was a manual process, while an automated configuration tool was used for iOS devices. A profile was pushed to iPhones to enable access to a corporate calendar, contacts and email. AirWatch integrates with the open source email system OBM Groupware. An AirWatch profile is also pushed to integrate with a Network Access Control (NAC) and a Juniper SSL VPN on the devices, to offer a secure and seamless experience to the end user.

Visio, an enterprise app developed by a third-party company, was pushed onto the tablets. The app was designed to be used during executive meetings to review the evolution of key performance indicators in a visual way to enable effective decision making. The app connects to a large database and refreshes data every week for meetings or on demand. It shows national, regional and individual data related to sales volume, cash and margins. The user’s profile allows access only to relevant data. For example, a sales manager in the south of France will only access the detailed data of this particular region.

Up Next
The company is also exploring mobile content management (MCM) through AirWatch Secure Content Locker™ (SCL), to securely store and distribute documents.