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CASE STUDY

© 2015 Networld Media Group | Sponsored by PROVISIO

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The playersWith offices in the United States and Europe, PROVISIO is a market-lead-ing software development company providing turnkey secure kiosk, digital signage software and remote management solutions. PROVISIO’s SiteKi-osk software has become the most commonly used secure kiosk software for public computers worldwide.

INTOUCH INTERACTIVE, based in Marietta, Georgia, is a provider of self-service solutions that capture and measure customer data. Traditional methods of collecting survey data typically are cumbersome, time-consum-ing and prone to errors. The company streamlines solutions by ensuring the validity of the data and providing a range of flexible methods for retrieving the information, and offers the ability to receive data in a number of dif-ferent file formats and data-mapping management. The process automa-tion achieved with InTouch leads to greater data integrity and significantly reduces workload and time.

The challengeDeerfield, Illinois-based Essendant is the largest wholesaler of office products and other business essentials in North America offering next-day delivery to more than 90 percent of the United States and providing more than 160,000 stocked products from dozens of facilities around the country. It also provides digital content, product expertise and marketing support.

The 93-year-old company formerly was known as United Stationers but rebranded itself after making a number of acquisitions that diversified its portfolio to include office furniture, tech products, business software, janito-rial products and automotive products. Its new name is a combination of “essentials” and “ascending” to reflect a unified brand.

With such a massive operation spread across so many locations, the com-pany needed a central platform to manage its workforce and offer services such as timekeeping, paycheck stub printing, communicating important information and enterprise-wide training.

PROVISIO’s software platform helps InTouch Interactive drive workforce-management solutions for a major supplier of office products and business essentials.

Keeping Workers Informed with Kiosks

By Richard Slawsky | Contributing writer, KioskMarketplace.com

Keeping Workers Informed with Kiosks

2© 2015 Networld Media Group | Sponsored by PROVISIO

Some Essendant employees have personal desktop or laptop computers to access such services, but many do not. For those who do not, the company wanted to provide a way to access its intranet that did not require compli-cated technology or a great deal of training.

“We wanted to supply a dedicated endpoint that had an engaging attract screen, and simple button-based options for ease of operation and user-friendliness,” said Tom Kentish, IT manager for field technology support with Essendant.

The solutionEssendant officials learned about InTouch Interactive via a Google search on kiosks and found its product demos to be attractive.

“We spoke to them, and before engagement they did some quick mock-ups of the attract screen and main menu, which our HR team found highly engaging,” Kentish said. “In short, the kiosk attract screen and menu look fantastic, and they were well received by our HR leadership team.”

The company chose to deploy the solution using Lenovo All-in-One e93z series kiosks. It rolled out the devices over a two week period in 2013 and now has more than 150 units in operation. The devices are driven by PRO-VISIO’s SiteKiosk, a kiosk software and lockdown browser for safeguarding public-access PCs, displays and tablets.

Keeping Workers Informed with Kiosks

3© 2015 Networld Media Group | Sponsored by PROVISIO

Essendant also is in the process of deploying PROVISIO’s SiteRemote product to further add to its ability to monitor and manage the large number of kiosks.

“Out of the box, this solution wasn’t feasible without our expertise with PROVISIO’s SiteKiosk product and experience with enterprise deploy-ments,” InTouch Interactive CEO Joe Bushey said.

“PROVISIO provides us with an excellent set of tools, which we integrate with our InTouch Client Framework to quickly deliver world-class enterprise solu-tions,” Bushey said. “Their well-documented object model/APIs make simple work of complex items for our development team, allowing us to spend time on more unique client challenges where we prefer to spend our effort.”

The resultsBy all accounts, Essendant is immensely pleased with the performance of the kiosks.

The company had some unique requirements that made the kiosk a bit differ-ent from most standard units. First, all kiosks required domain logon/authen-tication as many of its applications use single sign-on (SSO) to authenticate the users to their applications. In addition, the units are highly interactive due to multiple profiles being written/updated on a daily basis.

Keeping Workers Informed with Kiosks

4© 2015 Networld Media Group | Sponsored by PROVISIO

Some of the initial user-experience feedback was that logons were slow, partly due to the nature of how the local Web server (which adds to attractiveness of the menu) must load after reboot. InTouch assisted Essendant with optimizing how the Apache Web server was configured to load, and the situation improved as each profile loaded and the menu was displayed. The kiosks also are set to reboot daily at 3 a.m., which improves their logon experience.

“The machines are used a great deal during the day, and some warehouses have four or five deployed to meet demand,” Kentish said. “As we increase user population by organic growth and acquisition of new units, we are con-tinually adding to the population of kiosks.”

In addition, the company has been more than pleased with InTouch’s follow-up support.

“Over the past six to eight months, Joe [Bushey] personally has become more engaged and has shown us better processes to improve the kiosks and have their code running at optimal level,” Kentish said. “While it might be easy for the normal CEO to subcontract us out to support and hope for the best, he has gone above and beyond our expectations. I cannot recall any other CEO who routinely puts that level of attention into their clients’ needs.”

Bushey attributes part of the deployment’s success to the capabilities of PROVISIO’s software products.

“We’ve exclusively used PROVISIO’s SiteKiosk and SiteRemote products for nearly a decade, and have found they are always ahead of the curve with new operating systems and industry needs,” he said.

“Kiosk solutions require long engagements and incremental support and service for the best outcomes,” Bushey said. “This is one such case, whereby we remained engaged with the client to ensure the outcomes were exceed-ing expectations.”

With offices in the United States and Europe, PROVISIO is a market-leading software development company providing turnkey secure kiosk, digital signage software and remote management solutions. PROVISIO products are marketed in more than 50 countries.

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