FleetPride – A BetterCloud Case Study

Founded in 1999, FleetPride is the largest independent distributor of aftermarket heavy-duty truck and trailer parts with more than 256 locations in 45 states across the US.

Employees: 3,400
Founded: 1999
Industry: Distribution & Retail
Website: fleetpride.com

Scaling Cross-Country with Google Apps

Since its founding more than a decade ago, FleetPride has expanded rapidly across the country. Three years ago, FleetPride’s IT department realized their in-house Exchange system simply wasn’t going to keep up with continued expansion without expensive and time-intensive upgrades.

According to Matthew Perry, FleetPride’s Manager of IT PMO, “We needed to right-size our IT to meet our growth and that would have included upgrading Exchange. With our small IT team already limited on resources, it didn’t make sense to continue to upgrade and maintain a system that we could very easily outsource at a lower cost. Google Apps provided more security, better uptime and expanded functionality.” So FleetPride, with the help of Google Apps reseller Cloud Sherpas, made the transition to the cloud.

Three years later, FleetPride’s employees are seeing the benefits of moving to Google Apps. “While in the beginning it was a challenge to get people off of Outlook, once you show them the efficiency you gain with Google, employees really buy into it. They realize how much time they’re getting back – no more worrying about versions or email attachments. I haven’t used Office in three years, I just don’t find a need for it,” said Matt.

Today, with employees firmly on Google Apps, Google Drive in particular is of increasing value to FleetPride. “We consider Mail, Calendar and Contacts to be the core… but Drive is coming up fast,” adds Matt.

Adding Efficiency with BetterCloud

While FleetPride’s roll out of Google Apps went smoothly, Matt found he needed increased administrative controls for the suite. With the help of Cloud Sherpas, FleetPride found BetterCloud and became an alpha customer. “We were very excited to be part of the small alpha group and saw value early on,” Matt remarked.

“In terms of what we do on a day in and day out basis, our IT team handles a lot of email forwarding and inbox delegation requests, both of which are really facilitated through BetterCloud. Without the application, we would have to handle these tasks manually by resetting passwords and logging into end-user accounts. From a security perspective it’s not something we want to be doing.”

“I can easily say that BetterCloud has added efficiency and saved us time on the support services desk,” Matt adds. “For instance, if I want to forward an account without BetterCloud, I have to reset the account password manually, forward the account and wait for the recipient to accept. With BetterCloud, that process goes from four or five steps to just one. That is simply time back that we can allocate to other projects.”

Matt also uses bulk editing features for Groups management, noting that doing so “literally saves dozens of hours. The bulk import export Group integration features are golden.”

Driving Value to the Business

“BetterCloud allows us to drive solutions faster from a holistic standpoint on the service desk. By doing what used to take hours, in minutes, we can drive service to the business immediately. In terms of an IT services delivery standpoint, we’re adding efficiency every day,” he said.

The beauty of BetterCloud is its simplicity, it’s not hard to understand its value.
Matthew Perry, Manager, IT PMO, FleetPride

This added efficiency is in no doubt partly responsible for Perry’s move into the Manager, IT PMO role from his position as Manager, IT Services. “BetterCloud has helped me grow into my new role. I was asked to start up the Project Management Office group partly because of my success with the Google Apps implementation and support services in general,” he said. Now, rather than only managing FleetPride’s Google Apps deployment and service desk function, Matt oversees IT portfolio strategy and project implementation for the entire IT group.

Bolstering Domain Security

While time savings are a huge benefit, Matt was “extraordinarily happy when BetterCloud gained Google Drive and Calendar explorer capabilities.” When an employee needed access to a calendar created years prior, Matt found there was no easy way to figure out ownership in the native Google Apps admin interface. But, with BetterCloud “I could easily add a new user without having to get the calendar’s owner involved.”

This same process is also true for reassigning or editing document ownership. “When someone with a Google Doc leaves the organization and someone new comes on who needs access, we simply grant permission via BetterCloud and move on. This expedited service delivery is a huge value-add to our business.”

In the future, Matt plans to take advantage of BetterCloud’s Drive Compliance Engine and DLP functionality. “While we see plenty of value from BetterCloud in terms of domain security, DLP functionality will only increase our security for cloud-based storage. Regular expression searches will enable our IT team to search for credit card and social security numbers shared improperly.”

Going to the Extra Mile

In addition to the time-saving functionality Matt gains from BetterCloud, communication with the BetterCloud team has exceeded his expectations. “BetterCloud does a great job reaching out to and getting feedback from their customers, which enables them to push out excellent content and add features I really need. This type of communication seems simple in abstract, but in practice, it’s hard to execute and BetterCloud does a great job, really putting them far above other companies in the space.”