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HipCheck Mobile Technology from SCO Helps Major Electrical Wholesaler Avoid Downtime and Save Money

MM Electrical Merchandising (MMEM) is a major operator in the electrical wholesaling business in Australia. While they are headquartered in North Rocks, New South Wales, Australia, the company employs more than 1,000 people across 176 service centers in key locations throughout Australia. Key to the company’s success is providing a wide variety of parts and inventory that customers can readily access. The company prides itself on offering customers convenient locations and competitive prices based on the leveraged buying power of their large global network of locations distributed throughout the country.

To keep up with the company’s vast inventory of electrical parts, each of their 176 locations depends upon a Progress database solution running on SCO UnixWare. The company runs their software on custom made white box servers. Neil Evans, the technical support manager for MMEM, helps ensure that all of the systems in MMEM locations throughout the country stay up and running. “The number one hindrance to our business from an I.T. perspective is downtime,” said Evans. “When a system goes down, a branch location is then forced to document every transaction on paper and then re-enter that information once their system is back up and running. This obviously impacts our ability to provide great customer service and causes a lot of redundancies in our work.”

Evans attributes the vast majority of a branch locations’ downtime to a hardware failure. “Ninety-eight percent of the time it’s a hardware issue, and of the hardware issues, it can typically be attributed to a disk failure.”

“When a store system goes down, we have to address it right away and send out a new system that can replace the problem machine,” said Evans. “In some extreme cases, when a system at a branch location goes down at the end of the business day and it’s too late to overnight a new system, we’ll send a support engineer out on an evening airline flight with a new machine so they can have the new machine installed by the time the store opens the next business day. This is both costly and impractical.”

Proactively Monitoring and Controlling Systems with HipCheck
Because of the lost time and productivity due to a store system being out-of-service, MMEM was looking for a more cost-effective way to proactively monitor and control their systems. MMEM has a full-time help desk staff of five people with additional staff that operates on-call, 24 hours a day. To make their small team more effective, MMEM turned to HipCheck from SCO.

“Rather than waiting for a problem to appear or constantly reacting to problems, we worked with SCO to adopt their HipCheck mobile solution for proactively monitoring and controlling our servers and PCs remotely,” said Evans. “With HipCheck, we can monitor a systems available memory, log files, CPU and network performance, and be immediately alerted if a system is about to have trouble—all from our Windows mobile phone.”

“With HipCheck, our helpdesk staff are empowered to take care of problems before they arise. I.T. issues can become transparent to our branch locations which means they can focus on providing great customer service and transact business without worrying about their systems. Every I.T. department desires to have greater control over their systems and proactively pre-empt computer problems before they happen. With HipCheck, our I.T. department will be more prepared to keep all of our branch locations up and running and that will ultimately make for happier customers,” said Evans.

	HipCheck Mobile Technology from SCO Helps Major Electrical Wholesaler Avoid Downtime and Save Money MM Electrical Merchandising (MMEM) is a major operator in the electrical wholesaling business in Australia. While they are headquartered in North Rocks, New South Wales, Australia, the company employs more than 1,000 people across 176 service centers in key locations throughout Australia. Key to the company’s success is providing a wide variety of parts and inventory that customers can readily access. The company prides itself on offering customers convenient locations and competitive prices based on the leveraged buying power of their large global network of locations distributed throughout the country. To keep up with the company’s vast inventory of electrical parts, each of their 176 locations depends upon a Progress database solution running on SCO UnixWare. The company runs their software on custom made white box servers. Neil Evans, the technical support manager for MMEM, helps ensure that all of the systems in MMEM locations throughout the country stay up and running. “The number one hindrance to our business from an I.T. perspective is downtime,” said Evans. “When a system goes down, a branch location is then forced to document every transaction on paper and then re-enter that information once their system is back up and running. This obviously impacts our ability to provide great customer service and causes a lot of redundancies in our work.” Evans attributes the vast majority of a branch locations’ downtime to a hardware failure. “Ninety-eight percent of the time it’s a hardware issue, and of the hardware issues, it can typically be attributed to a disk failure.” “When a store system goes down, we have to address it right away and send out a new system that can replace the problem machine,” said Evans. “In some extreme cases, when a system at a branch location goes down at the end of the business day and it’s too late to overnight a new system, we’ll send a support engineer out on an evening airline flight with a new machine so they can have the new machine installed by the time the store opens the next business day. This is both costly and impractical.” Proactively Monitoring and Controlling Systems with HipCheck Because of the lost time and productivity due to a store system being out-of-service, MMEM was looking for a more cost-effective way to proactively monitor and control their systems. MMEM has a full-time help desk staff of five people with additional staff that operates on-call, 24 hours a day. To make their small team more effective, MMEM turned to HipCheck from SCO. “Rather than waiting for a problem to appear or constantly reacting to problems, we worked with SCO to adopt their HipCheck mobile solution for proactively monitoring and controlling our servers and PCs remotely,” said Evans. “With HipCheck, we can monitor a systems available memory, log files, CPU and network performance, and be immediately alerted if a system is about to have trouble—all from our Windows mobile phone.” “With HipCheck, our helpdesk staff are empowered to take care of problems before they arise. I.T. issues can become transparent to our branch locations which means they can focus on providing great customer service and transact business without worrying about their systems. Every I.T. department desires to have greater control over their systems and proactively pre-empt computer problems before they happen. With HipCheck, our I.T. department will be more prepared to keep all of our branch locations up and running and that will ultimately make for happier customers,” said Evans.