Crompton Corporation is a global manufacturer of polymer products and chemicals. The company has 1,900 employees in 55 locations across 30 countries in Europe, in the fields of research, manufacturing, sales, and administration.

The Challenge: Providing a Mobile Workforce with Personalised Information

Crompton Europe has 300 mobile workers, including the sales team and research employees, who need remote access to business critical information while at customer sites or in the field. The company had already seen the benefits of a centralised server-based computing architecture with Citrix® MetaFrame® Presentation Server for Windows®, and wanted to extend this to role-based access to information and applications through a Web browser.

“Generally, employees only use about five percent of the tools they are given, and having to actively search for the information most appropriate to their jobs was creating inefficiencies,” said Warren Jones, IT Manager, Crompton Europe. “Further, it was critical that whatever solution was used to provide role-based access to information fitted seamlessly into Crompton Corporation’s business continuity strategy.”

Implementing Citrix MetaFrame Secure Access Manager

“It was clear that great efficiency gains could be made by providing role-based access using Citrix MetaFrame Secure Access Manager to deliver to users what they actually need,” commented Jones.

With the help of Execute, a Gold-level Citrix Solution Advisor, Crompton Europe successfully implemented Citrix MetaFrame Secure Access Manager. “We were amazed to see the first set of screens running in a day,” said Jones. “The first Content Delivery Agents (CDAs) that we implemented were out-of-the-box and provided MetaFrame Presentation Server-published applications, Internet/Intranet access, messaging, world clocks and weather content, but we will also be developing our custom CDAs with the help of Execute.” CDAs are software modules that plug into the framework to present tailored views of applications and content.

Increasing Efficiency Through Role-based Access

Crompton Europe’s mobile workforce is now using MetaFrame Secure Access Manager to provide access to information and applications remotely, and the IT team will soon be rolling it out to the rest of the 1,500 employees in the European organisation. “By giving our employees in the field access to real-time information, we can gain a competitive advantage as an organisation,” explained Jones. “We have also seen productivity gains, as the role-specific access we have enabled improves work processes.  We want to extend this benefit to the rest of the company.”

“We currently have an Intranet to share documents and information, such as flight plans and log-on codes. We predict that Citrix MetaFrame Secure Access Manager will completely replace this.

“Citrix MetaFrame Secure Access Manager makes it possible for sales people to get business-relevant content in whatever country they are working. For instance, if an employee is on business in Italy, he will be able to get all the information he needs in one place - be it the products that are manufactured there, hotels in the area, or the current exchange rate,” Jones said.

Crompton Europe has already gained many benefits from Citrix solutions, having implemented Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server software to deploy applications such as SAPBW, a business analytics tool, to 1,500 employees across the European organisation. Citrix MetaFrame Secure Access Manager is a natural extension to Crompton Europe’s existing Citrix access MetaFrame infrastructure, and enables Warren Jones and his IT team of 16 to easily administer the system and remotely support all users – despite the fact that IT staff are not present at all 55 locations.

Business continuity is also high on the agenda for Jones, and Citrix solutions play an integral part in the company’s strategy. “Citrix technology is the ideal mechanism for business continuity, because everything is centralised and therefore there is no need for multiple disaster recovery locations. We now have a dependable and secure architecture that has streamlined our business processes,” Jones concluded.

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