About the company

"Automobile House "Energia GmbH" LLC is a distributor of Daimler AG in Belarus authorized to represent Mercedes-Benz, Mercedes-AMG, Mercedes-Maybach, and Setra brands in the Belarusian market. In addition to car sales, the company provides repair and maintenance services.

Situation 

To achieve high productivity, modern employees need more than one device, and more than one application service. Some people use online services for collaboration on documents, other share files via cloud storage, and the rest use messengers to exchange documents with colleagues and partners. The variety of services reduces productivity and hinders communication. 

Automotive House “Energia GmbH” encountered this problem. To work with contracts and provide customers with necessary certificates and other documents, corporate engineers needed to stay in touch with the sales department and other office specialists. In this regard, the company's executives asked Softline specialists to streamline communication between employees. The car dealership also needed to license Microsoft office applications and implement a modern enterprise-grade email system.

Solution

Softline specialists offered the customer to consider the Office 365 cloud solutions and demonstrated their main capabilities. The solution features the latest versions of productivity applications, corporate email, enterprise portal, collaboration tools, free calls, meetings, and much more. The key reasons for choosing Office 365 were the wide functionality of the product, its cost, and scalability. 

As part of the project, the Automobile House “Energia GmbH” migrated to the new Exchange email service, which is distinguished for its high information security. Special tools block malicious programs and unwanted email, while the encryption platform prevents confidential data leaks. Built-in calendars, contacts, and cloud storage enhance collaboration and allow you to quickly and easily schedule meetings and share documents. Guaranteed zero downtime provides additional IT infrastructure resilience. 

Many dealership employees spend most of their time on the go, meeting with customers and partners, and visiting service centers. It is often necessary to approve and send the required deal-related documents on the go. Teams, the main collaboration hub in Office 365, helps you stay in touch with your customers and partners. For prompt communication, specialists use chats where they can discuss projects, approve necessary documents, hold meetings, and make calls. The integration of Teams with productivity applications (Word, Excel, etc.) makes it is even more comfortable and more convenient to edit and send relevant document versions.

It is essential for many car buyers to discuss the technical properties of a car in advance, assess whether it needs repair, and get an accurate idea of its state. Another benefit of Teams is that the dealership specialists can invite external partners or clients to Teams by using guest accounts and promptly discuss emerging issues with them. This feature increases customer loyalty. Working in a single ecosystem saves the time of employees: they don't have to switch to other services to solve individual tasks.

To streamline the document flow, Softline experts offered the company to transfer the current corporate document storage and re-build it in SharePoint. The new storage is suitable not only for internal documents but also for all the files that employees collaborate on and exchange in Teams, Outlook, and other Office 365 services. This way, all documents are available in one place and, if necessary, dealership employees can access them at any time. All this facilitates access to important data and optimizes the workflow.

Result

Softline engineers helped the customer migrate from current systems, configured platform services, and trained the staff in basic operating procedures. After the project implementation, Softline provided the company with consulting and technical support.

The employees of Automobile House "Energy GmbH" have consolidated and streamlined all communications on the Office 365 platform, which is reliably protected and supports backup and automatic updating of productivity applications. The Office 365 services are available at any time, so the company's specialists are always in touch—they can quickly respond to requests, send documents, check their email, etc. If your smartphone or laptop runs out of power, you can also access your documents from another computer through your browser.

"We followed an employee-oriented approach in this project. Some specialists needed productivity applications for daily work, while others needed only services (email, chat, web-based document editing, etc.). We unified the applications, services, and devices used by the staff. Now the team works in a single secure environment, and each employee uses the tools they need. Such an approach increases savings and lowers the cost of ownership for the Office 365 services compared to local hosting of standalone software systems," said Viktor Sinyak, Microsoft Solution Sales Manager, Softline.

"Office 365 has made communications more comfortable and efficient. We are mastering new services and teamwork approaches, and we see that employees have become more active in discussing projects and more responsive to the requests of colleagues. Even out of office, we can connect to the Office 365 services and work without interruptions. Besides, we optimized software costs by using monthly subscription to Office 365," said Denis Meshkun, IT specialist.