Objective: 100% of calls and meetings maintained
The Saretec teams provide damage assessment services and optimize repair costs on behalf of their customers – insurers, brokers, mutual insurance companies, etc. The teams are composed of office-based specialists who work on desktop computers and stay in close contact by phone with customers and field experts, who are equipped with tablets and smartphones. The challenge: transitioning nearly 1,400 employees to working from home in order to manage 100% of calls and meetings after France’s lockdown was announced.
Our long-term vision enabled the Group to build a robust IT infrastructure, partly thanks to our partnership with Orange Business.
Alain Guède, Chief Information Officer, Saretec
Remote access via the VPN network
Saretec was one of the first companies to contact Orange Business to make the switch to working from home. “We had 48 hours to manage the transition for over 90% of our employees,” says Alain Guède, Chief Information Officer at Saretec. Field experts under lockdown could access their work environment from their mobile devices to perform assessments by videoconference. The office-based specialists’ personal devices had to be compatibility tested as quickly as possible to ensure they could log on to their work computers remotely.
A reliable VPN network was key for them to be able to remotely access their work environment. In just three days, Orange increased Saretec’s TSE (Terminal Server Edition – remote user access to applications) connection capacity by a factor of 10, going from 7 to 70 servers capable of managing up to 700 simultaneous connections.
A successful transition to working from home that affirms Saretec’s approach
While working from home was already on the rise at Saretec, the COVID-19 crisis accelerated that trend. “Our long-term vision enabled the Group to build a robust IT infrastructure, partly thanks to our partnership with Orange Business,” notes Guède. “We didn’t have to overhaul our systems to deal with this unprecedented situation. Boosting our capacity was enough to handle peak loads.”
200%
increase in remote work capacity thanks to the cloud
Orange Business used the cloud to double Saretec’s work-from-home capacity in under a week, going from 90 to 150 virtual servers and 20Tb to 40Tb of storage. Furthermore, the business applications stored in the Orange cloud (Flexible Workspace IaaS Factory) are kept operational thanks to a Business Recovery Plan (BRP). With these measures in place, Saretec’s employees can safely continue to do their jobs, keeping their focus on what really matters: customer relationships. Saretec plans to continue on this path until the public health situation has stabilized, while working on the process of thoroughly assessing the next upgrades to its IT architecture.