Carters New Zealand

Auckland, New Zealand

Company Overview
Carters New Zealand is a fully owned business of Carter Holt Harvey, Australia's leading forest products company and one of the largest forest products companies in the Southern Hemisphere. Carters supplies building materials to the trade for both commercial and residential purposes, and has 37 stores throughout New Zealand.

The Problem
Carters was using PCs to run their various software and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, but these PCs were quite old and were in need of replacement. As Carters is a rapidly expanding business, with new stores continually being added to the branch network, they also required a solution that would enable them to expand their computer network in the most cost-efficient way.

Another consideration was that the environment, being involved in the construction industry, is very dusty, and therefore having a system with no moving parts or external drives ensures that the dust does not affect the system.

The Solution
Carters took the recommendation of their IT consultants, Unisys, and weighed up the options for implementing thin clients versus new PCs and the comparative costs of implementation for each.

"The thin client solution matched our requirements very well," said Mike Lambert, Carters IT Manager. "Carters has 37 branches across New Zealand that are supported from head office based in Auckland. We needed to be able to support our network of branches from a remote site and remove some of the costs of maintaining a wide area network (WAN)."

"For example, previously if there were problems with one of the PCs at a location, we physically had to go there to service the machine, which took up valuable time and resources. Running thin clients meant that we could service the branch from head office without the need to travel to the location."

Carters chose Wyse® Winterm™ terminals because the serial ports available on this model suited their need to have individual printers at each location.

The final decision was based on costs and ease of implementation across all their sites without major disruption to the business.

Carters now has 470 thin clients in service. The roll out across all 37 locations took four weeks.

The Benefits
"Thin clients have taken away the need for a lot of the engineering work that we previously did," said Lambert. "We no longer have to pull PCs apart, and we don't have to go on site to fix problems or install new applications - it can all be done from the central server based in Auckland."

"The terminals have no moving parts so if something does go wrong it is as simple as sending back the terminal and replacing it with another one, whereas if you were working on a network you couldn't do this."

Carters thin client implementation has also stopped the company from being caught on the 'technology upgrade treadmill', meaning in the long-term they will realise significant cost savings.

"As the Winterm terminals have a lifespan of 10-15 years, we don't have to worry that in three years the technology will change - because we just have to upgrade our servers and plug them in rather than replacing every PC in the country. If we have to add more users to the system, we just plug another server and we're in business."

The cost of implementing thin clients was also a much less expensive option than replacing the old PCs with new ones. The company saved over NZ$470,000 on the purchase costs alone.

Technical Details

• Number of users: 470
• Wyse Winterm thin clients
• Citrix Metaframe server running Microsoft Windows 2000
• File and print server with Microsoft NT4.0
• Microsoft Exchange server for email

"The thin client solution matched our requirements very well. Carters has 37 branches across New Zealand that are supported from head office based in Auckland. We needed to be able to support our network of branches from a remote site and remove some of the costs of maintaining a wide area network (WAN). For example, previously if there were problems with one of the PCs at a location, we physically had to go there to service the machine, which took up valuable time and resources. Running thin clients meant that we could service the branch from head office without the need to travel to the location."

Mike Lambert
IT Director
Carters

For more information, contact
Wyse Technology Australia P/L
Level 11
100 Miller Street
North Sydney
New South Wales 2060
Australia
Phone 1300 88 9973 or
+61 (0) 2 9492 0180
Fax +61 2 9954 7944