The story in a nutshell
- Specialist retailer Lucky Bike is on a growth trajectory and has opened stores throughout Germany in recent years.
- To support this growth, the IT team sought a solution that would enable secure remote access, management, and monitoring of around 1,400 devices.
- Thanks to TeamViewer remote monitoring and management, the team now has a permanent overview of the status of its workstations and mobile devices.
- Fast and secure: Patch management reduces the time for software roll-outs from weeks to hours.
- Remote support and automated workflows and alerts save valuable time and enable efficient monitoring.
Introduction
Lucky Bike is one of Germany’s largest bicycle retailers. In more than 40 locations and a large online shop, the retailer offers more than 150,000 name-brand bicycles on over 120,000 square meters of sales and storage space – including consulting, services, and test tracks. TeamViewer Remote and the integrated functions for remote management and monitoring (RMM) give the IT team a lean, yet high-performance platform for keeping track of the growing company’s IT equipment and keeping it up to date at all times.
Challenges
Germany’s bicycle sector has enjoyed a tailwind for many years now, with sales of around 9.5 billion euros in 2022 alone according to “Branchenbericht Fahrrad”, a recent industry report. Growth is expected to continue in the future at a rate of around 7 percent annually.
This growth is mirrored in the evolution of Lucky Bike’s business: the number of stores has grown from 25 in June 2020 to 38 in the meantime. This is in addition to several large warehouses and administrative offices. The IT team at Lucky Bike is responsible for the company’s entire hardware and software setup and supports this growth through activities like equipping new stores, performing maintenance and updates for the existing device pools, and the rollout of new software – and is also responsible for cybersecurity and the network.
This is where the challenge arose for department head Andreas Michels, team lead Pietro Olla, and their IT team: New solutions were needed to keep pace with the rapid growth and maintain their high quality standards. The team needed a management and monitoring solution to:
- Provide remote support to around 1,400 devices at its stores throughout Germany
- Keep track of the status of individual devices and entire stores
- Roll out updates to specific device groups – not only workstations for consulting and sales, but also smartphones and Android-based hand scanners, for instance.
Pietro Olla IT Team Lead at Lucky Bike
“Due to our constant growth, we needed a tool that would let us manage, monitor, and control our devices centrally, with little effort. That’s where TeamViewer came into play: The software is already installed on all our devices as a standard for remote support, so it made sense to use the integrated RMM features as well, particularly asset management and device monitoring. This reduced our everyday workload significantly.”
Solution
On the asset management side, the patch management features gave a particularly large boost to the efficiency of Olla and his team. “We can roll out updates to all of our devices at ease, with a single click – Windows updates as well as other software. So we can ensure that our devices are always up to date and maintain maximum security for our systems. And it saves our team a lot of time, which means saving money for the company,” says Olla. “Without patch management, we’d need weeks for rollouts that only take us two or three days now.”
The device monitoring feature supports the team with its regular checks of the device pool and also serves as an early-warning system for larger potential problems. “If a store computer fails, it’s no big deal, because we have redundant workstations in all of our stores. But if we lose the network and our internet connection, then our people won’t have access to central systems like merchandise management. That can have direct consequences for our business and our customer satisfaction,” says Olla.
Thanks to the monitoring dashboard and customizable alerts, the IT team now has a fast, efficient picture of the status of a store’s equipment and can react immediately if problems occur.
Result
Lucky Bike found the right tool to support its rapid growth in TeamViewer. As regular users of the remote support solution, it was only logical for the IT team to use the device management and monitoring features through the integrated solution in the TeamViewer client. The efficiency gains, particularly through centralized patch management, have helped the company to achieve ROI in a very short time.
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